Ask Sean Rima what the weather is like out his way and he will ask: where exactly?
Across the hills, lakes and valleys of Connemara, four seasons in one day doesn’t quite cover the variety of weather Atlantic forces can bring.
A kaleidoscope comes closer to describing the rapid changes that can affect conditions in highly localised patches.
“I can be looking at the Clifden station and it’s pouring with rain and I look out the window here and it’s bright sunshine,” he says of the weather station data coming from less than 20km away as the crow flies from his home in Renvyle, Co Galway. “It’s interesting to watch the way the weather moves.”
Rima is one of about 150 amateur weather watchers in Ireland whose private weather stations feed information continually to Met Éireann on the Wow (Weather Observations Website) network.
The data is not official as there are too many variations in the type of equipment used to quality-control them all.
But Wow is an important supplement to the 25 official Met Éireann weather stations around the State.
Met Éireann says these contribute to “better forecasts, more accurate warnings and a deeper understanding of our changing climate”.
“It fills the gaps in coverage,” says Noel Fitzpatrick, acting head of observations.
“It’s also useful to consult where there is a particular weather event taking place, to check the progress of a weather front or incoming severe weather.”
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But Met Éireann will soon lose access to Wow after a decision by its UK hosts to discontinue the platform.
The UK Met Office established it and watched it grow into an international network but it says ageing technology means it can no longer be supported and it will shut down in December.
Met Éireann is working with other EU states to develop a replacement platform.
“We are cautiously looking at early 2027 [as a start date],” Fitzpatrick says. “We want to minimise the downtime between the current system and its replacement.”
Wow contributors include schools, sports clubs and some public bodies but mostly they are individuals, often with a combined interest in weather and technology.
PJ Naughter, a software developer from Ballygarrett in Co Wexford, fits that description perfectly.
“It’s not hard to set up a weather station. Anyone can get a good one for a couple of hundred euro – although you can spend thousands if you want,” he says.
“I’ve connected mine to a network in the US and other international ones so you’re feeding information from Wexford all around the world.”
He gets plenty in return too, recalling the Tonga volcano eruption in 2022 that was so violent, it upset atmospheric pressure worldwide.
“You could see the pressure waves approaching Ireland,” he says. “The first wave approached after about five hours and the second one from the other direction came after about 11 hours.
“You could see it happening in real time just by watching the data on the websites.”
Sean Rima is more interested in local phenomena and collates data from 10 stations he and other enthusiasts installed around west Galway.
Posting on the connemaraweather.eu website as well as Wow, they track conditions far from the official stations at Mace Head and Galway city.
“I used to sail on the Killary so I always needed to know what the weather was doing,” he said.
“Now I fly a drone to take photographs so I can look at an area before I head out and see what the last 10 or 20 minutes have been doing.
“I have a station out on Inishturk and one on Inishbofin because whatever happens out there eventually comes to us.”
Met Éireann is working to add extra weather stations to its own network, but Noel Fitzpatrick believes the local stations will always be important.
“We are a very varied country and that affects weather locally even within short distances,” he says.
“You can have substantial variability whether you are in an exposed area, on the side of a hill or in a valley. That’s the kind of information Wow supplies.”
Scientific value aside, the Wow site is also a beacon for weather enthusiasts who just want to prove a point.
If you’ve ever wondered why it feels warmer or colder in your corner of the country than officially forecast, the chances are a check on a local weather station on the Wow website will prove you are not imagining things.
The website wow.met.ie has a map where all the weather stations can be clicked to check current conditions and past conditions – in some cases going back several years.
At the minimum, they record air temperature but many also relay data on humidity, rainfall, pressure, wind speed, direction and gust strength and soil temperature.
The data will not be transferred to whatever platform replaces Wow so Met Éireann is encouraging anyone who wants to archive past information in graph or table form to download it from the site before the network is shut down.