The UK media is famed for screaming, “SNOW CHAOS!” whenever 0.2cm of snow gently dusts the land, but with big snowfalls forecasted for the coming week, a new site has been created to search Twitter for real-time snow reports and display them on a map.
Put together by Ben Marsh, the site invites users to “Tweet the hashtag #uksnow, your location (postcode, town name or geotag your tweet), and rate the snow that is falling out of ten (0/10 for ne’er a flake – 10/10 for a beard freezing blizzard).”
Here’s the full snowy scale:
1. 7/10 or more – Blizzard!
2. 5/10 or 6/10 – Steady snowfall
3. 3/10 or 4/10 – Light snowfall
4. 1/10 or 2/10 – A few flakes
5. 0/10 – No snow 🙁
Brixton snow, Feb 2009
Marsh also asks meteorologically motivated Twitter users to record the depth of snow (cm or inches) and to attach a photo and add a description to their Tweet.
The end result is a map showing the location of snow falls in the UK, with a Twitter sidebar offering the latest updates to keep you informed about any possible unexpected snowball/face interfaces potentially coming to your ‘hood.
