We’ve just competed our 2nd round of #EnvironmentalDataDiscovery trails. This trail focused on meteorology and ran 11th – 14th & 21st – 24th April 2021. It comprised 5 questions to explore the Met Office’s Weather Observations Website (WOW), and 4 questions to explore the Meteorological Observations taken from Ben Nevis and Fort William available through NERC’s repository for Atmospheric Science and Earth Observation (the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis, CEDA).
Promotion of the trial increased web traffic to the NERC Digital Environment pages with 241 views of the quiz and 14 people submitting feedback on the environmental data explored. Here’s some of the keywords captured in the feedback provided:
To date we have also received 155 new views of the previous quiz “Environmental Data Discovery Trails – from the river catchment to deep ocean”, which remains available as a resource, although we are no longer actively collecting feedback.
We continue to learn from our participants and next time we’ll focus on a single data centre to help reduce the time required to complete the quiz. However, you’ll still have the option to tell us if a question is taking too long and skip to the next one. That type of information helps us identify where web navigation and data accessibility needs to be improved. We also noticed people were getting the right answers but not always providing them in the requested format. The automated scoring system sadly marked them incorrect as a result. Next time we’ll focus on single answer questions so attention to detail is less critical.
If you missed out this time, not to worry there will be more trails in the summer with opportunities to win a NERC water bottle or £100. Keep an eye on our website (https://digitalenvironment.org/data-trails/) or opt in for an email alert when a quiz goes live (https://noc-events.co.uk/environmental-data-discovery-trails-opt-form).
This trail has been archived as a resource for you to use at any time. Just one thing to watch – the available WOW met stations could change at any time. These weather data are provided by the public and stations can be removed.