We have wind again

Further to yesterday's wind speed problem: at around 12:50 today the anemometer appears to have started working again.

Let's hope it was just a temporary glitch.

File Under: Weather Station, WS3600, Wind Speed.

No wind? Really?

Today, as of the time of writing, the WS3600 hasn't recorded a single instance of wind speed above 0mph (the last record was at 2006-07-17 20:17:06 BST with a wind speed of 0.2mph). This isn't so unusual, I've seen periods before when the wind speed has sat at 0 for a large part of the day before it finally picks up. To the best of my knowledge I've only once had a whole day of not recording any wind — and that was because of snow.

The temperature today is close to 30°C so I don't think snow's a problem.

What makes this really odd is that there actually is a nice breeze out there at the moment. The vane itself is turning around from time to time in the breeze, I am recording different directions, I'm just not seeing any speed at all.

Given that the breeze is light and gusty I suppose it's possible that the base station is just never catching it while the impeller is turning (and I think I've seen it turning, sort of hard to tell as it's quite high up) but I can't help but think that this is unlikely.

The other thing I'm wondering is if the heat is causing a problem. It's probably the hottest day I've had so far since running the weather station, could it be that the heat has caused the impeller to stick or something?

All that said, I'm not the only person with this problem. Tim, who runs a WS2300 up in Perth in Scotland, is also seeing the same thing.

Update at 16:52 BST: There's quite a stiff breeze out there now and I've been out to have another look — despite the wind the impleller isn't spinning at all. It would appear that, for one reason or another, it's got stuck.

Update at 17:41 BST: I've had a further look at the impeller with a binocular and I can't see that there's anything there that would cause it to stick (a nice fat bumblebee for example). There's a more-or-less constant breeze now and nothing's happening. At the moment it would appear that, one way or another, today's heat has caused it to stick (probably through something expanding).

File Under: Weather Station, WS3600, Wind Speed.

And now for some cryptozoology...

I knew the sky camera would come in handy. This morning, it managed to catch evidence of Rods flying around my own back garden! ;)

File Under: Rods, Cryptozoology, Webcam.

In the long run...

I've just added a new page of graphs to the weather site: the last 150 days. At the moment it only contains graphs for temperature, humidity, pressure and wind speed but I'll probably get round to expanding that at some point.

The graphs are updated daily, around local midnight.

File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, Graphs, Gnuplot.

One Stormy Morning

So far the revived CloudCam seems to be working pretty well. I'm still doing the odd tweak here and there and sometimes the exposure isn't quite what it could be but it's a lot better than the last attempt at getting something like this working.

This morning a storm came over my location so, as a test, I've made this little video from the captured images:

File Under: Weather Station, Webcam, CloudCam, Video.

CloudCam revived

Back in March of this year I had a play with setting up a CloudCam. In the end it didn't work out too well so I gave up on that setup.

Last night, after trying to revive the rain bucket, I decided to have another go at getting a CloudCam up and running. This time around I used an old Windows XP box and quickly wrote some code in Delphi to do the capture of images. I'm not considering it live yet (hence the fact that it's not on the menu of weather site yet) but CloudCam is up and running again – for the moment anyway.

This is just an experiment to see if I can get something working well with the new equipment and new software. If it doesn't turn out well I'll disable it all again. If it does I'll have it go "live".

File Under: Weather, Clouds, Sky Camera, Cloud Camera, WebCam.

Rain bucket back from the dead?

Ever since the rain bucket died back in April I've been meaning to open it up and have a look inside to see if there were any obvious problems. As often happens, it was one of those little jobs that just kept being put off.

This evening I finally decided to pop the top off and have a look inside.

I was amazed at how simple it is inside. I couldn't see any obvious problems. While there was some dirt in on the rocker I doubt it would have been something to cause a problem (besides, when the bucket first appeared to die, I made a point of causing it to tip and I could hear and feel it happen). Despite not finding any obvious problems I came into the office to find that 0.5mm of rain had been recorded. It would appear that the bucket is back from the dead.

Possibly.

One thing I would note is that it got tipped a few times while I was cleaning it and then putting the cover back on yet I only got 0.5mm of rain recorded. I don't know if this means it was a "lucky" one-off or if the base-station ignores too many tips in a short time. I'll give it another tip soon to see if I get more rain recorded.

So, fingers crossed...

Update: Hmm, perhaps not. I've been out and tipped the bucket again and nothing has shown up on the base station. It would seem that it was a one-off event. Now I'm confused again.

File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, Rain Bucket.