Come rain or shine, a new website showing the current weather conditions in Galway is now available to the general public. The site uses real-time data collected by a weather station at NUI Galway to show temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, rain and sunshine.

Behind the project is the Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable Energy (IRUSE) at NUI Galway, under the leadership of Dr Marcus Keane. IRUSE focuses on achieving the goal of energy efficient buildings. In order to support ongoing and future research activity, IRUSE installed an automated weather station at NUI Galway.

Information from the weather station now appears in real-time on a website http://weather.nuigalway.ie/ thanks to students of the HDip / MSc in Software Design and Development. Colin Divily from Corofin, Co Galway and Naomi Ono, originally from Japan, implemented the website through a collaboration with the Discipline of Information Technology. They were supported by Johann Ott, Magdalena Hajdukiewicz and other members of the IRUSE group.

Dr Marcus Keane explains: “The website displays the live weather data, as well as 12-hour and monthly trends and provides essential data for the research carried out at the University. With the weather being such a constant topic of conversation for everyone in this country, we thought it only right to share this data with the general public.”

The weather station was installed in June 2010 on the roof of the Concourse building on campus. The data loads to the new website every minute from all of the sensors, except for rainfall which is reported hourly.

As well as for IRUSE’s research, the weather station is also used as part of teaching for the Energy Systems Engineering degree programme at NUI Galway.

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