One year of data

It's now 1 year since I first got open3600 running on my GNU/Linux box and got it talking to be WS3600. The first data recorded was at 2005-12-27 14:16 UT, it stuttered a little for a few minutes as I modified a couple of things and then was up and running.

That same afternoon I also started work on the main site.

Quite a frosty morning

It's quite a frosty morning this morning. It got down to around -2.6°C at one point. I couldn't resist getting the camera out and taking a few pictures:

See the full gallery for the full size images.

Record pressure

Further to yesterday's post about recording my highest pressure yet, the pressure climbed a little more and I ended up with a record high of 1041.9hPa at 23:17.

Still not quite enough to catch Tim's record of 1047.5 hPa back in January this year.

Some more work on the graphs

Back in July I added some graphs that showed the last 150 days' worth of data. I wrote the code to generate them rather quickly and have not touched it since.

This evening I've made some changes to how they're generated (got rid of the user of gnuplot's smooth facility and have also added some labels) and I've also added two extra graphs: the wind chill and also the impact of wind chill (the latter being the temperature minus the wind chill).

Another windless day (and another record)

Today looks like it's shaping up to be another totally windless day. Just like a couple of days ago it's very cold, foggy, damp and gloomy (and, by the looks of things, it's even worse for large parts of the UK today).

I've also had another record for my station today. At 11:09 I recorded a pressure reading of 1040.6 hPa — that's the highest I've recorded since I started keeping data acquired from the WS3600 (the previous record for me was 1037.2 hPa, back in January).

No wind?

So far today the weather station has recorded no wind. Looking back at my history a day with no wind recorded at all is a very rare event.

The only other time I've had a genuine day with no wind was 2006-06-17 (although yesterday came very close).

Unsurprisingly today and yesterday have been cold (but not as cold as it has been in Scotland), damp and foggy.

I've had a couple of other days with no wind recorded, but in both cases that was due to problems with the system. The first was on 2005-12-29 when snow clogged the anemometer, the second was 2006-07-18 when heat appeared to cause the impeller to stick.

One Year

I've just realised that I've now had the weather station up and running for just over a year. I first installed it on the 17^th of December last year (and wrote about the installation in some more detail a couple of days later).

I don't quite have a year's worth of data collected yet, I didn't start collecting and keeping data until the 27^th of December (that was the same day that I started work on the main site).

Morning clouds: The movie

Just over a month ago I posted a number of photographs of a really nice cloud display I found when I wandered over to the office. I've now gone back through my CloudCam archives and made a movie of the images taken around the same time. This is the result:

It's interesting to see just how quickly they "melt" away as the Sun rises.

Flying snail

I've just been looking back over some of the images captured by my CloudCam and stumbled on this little sequence:

Who knew snails could fly?

Wind distribution compass

The stats page on my weather station site has always had an all-time wind distribution table. The idea is to get some sort of idea of where the wind generally blows from at my location. While it does give that information it doesn't really have that "at a glance" feel to it that you really want.

This morning I decided that this data might also work well as a "compass graph":

I think that does a very good job of giving a "at a glance" appreciation of the data. What's really interesting is that the two main peaks are west and south-south-west. Generally the prevailing winds in this part of the UK are from the south-west so you'd expect the peak to be there. I suspect that the reason for the result you see above is that there's a house to the south-west of my setup and it's creating a wind shadow.

London Tornado

I've been staying in London most of the week (in Barnet to be exact). For most of this morning the weather was pretty fine down there, a little breezy but other than that we had nice clear skies, very little cloud to speak of.

As I was getting ready to leave this morning, at just after 11:00 UT, a large dark cloud moved in, it started to rain and the wind started to pick up. Suddenly there was lightning, then the rain really started to hammer down, followed by sleet and then hail. Suddenly the wind got very intense, worse than any wind I've experienced before — it was so windy it set off pretty much every car alarm in the street. And then, almost as quickly as it had come, it eased off.

I was amazed at what I saw but didn't think too much of it after that (other than being amazed and impressed, what with me being interested in weather and all).

The next couple of hours were spent on the underground and then the train back up to Lincolnshire and in all that time I never got to see any news. Then, this evening, I turned on the TV to catch up with the news and caught this story.

From what I can tell, looking at the location of the tornado and looking at the direction the weather was moving in, it seems that what I experienced was the remnants of that tornado.