In 2006, five new automated surface observing sites were added to the NWS Key West County Warning Area. Key West is the most unique forecast office in the nation for many reasons, not the least of which is that its entire area is encompassed by not even an entire county plus the largest marine area of responsibility in the National Weather Service (CONUS). In spite of this, there exist only two ASOS sites, a few CMAN stations, and no nearshore buoys in an area where approximately 2/3 of the US east coast commercial ship traffic passes (the Florida Straits).

In a project sponsored by UCAR/COMET, we attempt to answer questions related to the utility of inexpensive automated surface weather stations that are well sited, to provide additional information of value to the forecaster. We describe our quality control procedures, which are largely based on the NOAA MADIS utilities, and also describe some of the unique parameters of interest for Key West operations. Our focus for events that have occurred up to August 2007 include principally wind and heavy precipitation events, for which good siting is critical. Many individuals and entities report data to MADIS via the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP), but not all are valuable to operations. We attempt to identify objective criteria in Key West to help forecasters know which sites are useful, in general, and then also apply these criteria to another NWS office (Tallahassee).