A software engineer from Kanata has taken Ottawa’s Twitter community by storm by simply tweeting Ottawa’s daily weather records.
Rolf Campbell under the Twitter handle @YOW_Weather, posts each day’s daily or monthly weather records and how they compare to past years. His popularity has grown to 1,879 followers.
Campbell said his Twitter account stems from an interest in weather he has had since childhood.
“I’ve been interested in weather my whole life and I’ve been keeping weather stats really from a limited scale my whole life,” Campbell said.
Campbell joined Twitter because of his wife’s suggestion after previously sending out weather reports through a mailing list.
“My wife suggested that I use Twitter to distribute this information because it was a medium that was easier for people to sign up for and share with each other,” he said. “Mailing lists are kind of 1990s, right?”
As a software engineer, Campbell has designed several programs that create the statistics and graphs he tweets. His programs take information from Environment Canada and compare the weather from the current day to previous extremes while seeking other trends.
Campbell said he wrote a programming script that gathers statistics from Environment Canada that it publishes by the hour and day from locations across Canada on its website. His program then takes the data and compares the weather from the current day to previous extremes while seeking other trends.
“I gather those for the city of Ottawa and process those for statistics, I check to see what average temperatures are for every given day,” Campbell said.
Campbell found February was unusually cold.
“Recently we’ve had an extremely unusually cold few weeks. February was the coldest February in Ottawa since 1934,” Campbell said.
During his work over the years Campbell found the trend that Ottawa has gotten warmer over the past 100 years by 1.8 degrees Celsius, but said half of that rise can be attributed to a trick in weather.
“There is something called the heat island effect. The city itself is warmer than the rural areas: the concrete and asphalt holds onto heat especially at night more than the countryside. Trees and grass release heat more quickly than the asphalt, so as the city gets bigger the temperatures slightly go up in the city,” Campbell said.
Campbell’s interest in weather is only a hobby, though he said he did consider pursuing a career in meteorology. He eventually decided computer science was his passion and that it could be used with any field.
As for how he feels about the weather he tweets about, Campbell said he’s ready for some change.
“I walk to work every day, and I enjoy the variation of seasons but at the same time, I’ll be happy when I don’t have to wear ski pants anymore,” he said.
