According to the official UK weather service, the Met Office, the UK has just suffered through its longest spell of freezing conditions since December 1981.
The recent winter storms across the whole of the UK wreaked havoc with public transport and generally disrupted the lives of millions of UK residents. In calculating which regions were affected and determining where snow was falling or not and in what amounts, millions of UK residents turned to Twitter. Hundreds of thousands of them also turned to a specific Twitter-based application created by East Midlands resident and freelance web developer, Ben Marsh. The UK Snow Map lets Twitter users report where snow is falling and see those reports on a map in real-time. It works regardless of the cloud cover, which weather satellites do not.
The system works like this: anyone with a Twitter account (for those who don’t know, Twitter is an Internet-based microblogging service which limits messages to 140 characters) can report on local snow conditions. The person tweets (the name for an individual message) the hashtag #uksnow, plus their location – either the placename or first half of the local postcode, and a rating of snowfall from 0 (no snow) to 10 (blizzard). Those results are then placed on a map of the UK in real-time through the development expertise of Mr. Marsh – and give a visual reference on the local snow conditions as reported by actual residents on the ground in that location.
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