Return of the rain bucket?

The rain bucket attached to my weather station died around April last year. Since then, apart from one time when I opened it up to have a look inside, it's never registered a single thing.

Until a few days ago.

While checking some data this morning I noticed that there was rain recorded between around 07:00 and 09:00 and again between around 12:00 and 13:00. Checking that same day for a station near me it does seem that there was precipitation that day. The times appear to be different but, if I recall correctly, that was the day we had some snow so the different times could be down to the snow melting.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I'd be surprised to find that snow caused the bucket to spring back to life and given the nature of the problem (in the past the bucket hasn't recorded anything even when I've picked it up and given it a good tilt) I'd be surprised if it was the volume of water that caused it to work.

Something to keep an eye on...

After a long run, another crash

For the first time since 2006-08-21 the WS3600 base station has crashed on me. Looking at the logs it seems it crashed just after 21:11.

This is the longest run I've ever had without any sort of hang or crash of the base station — I was starting to think that it might finally be working properly. Seems I was wrong.

It's also probably worth mentioning that Ian, who had previously commented that he thought he'd fixed his WS3600, is still suffering from crashes.

Pictures from today's storm

As promised earlier, here are some images of the damage caused by today's storm:

Today's storm

It's very stormy today, probably the worst I've seen in a long time, easily the worst I've seen since I started running the weather station.

We've lost power three times so far today. The first couple of times were enough for the UPS to handle but the third loss looked like it was going to be a long one so I shut the machines down (hence a a hole in the data today).

The wind during the power loss was quite scary — I'm having trouble recalling when I last saw wind like that. We appear to have lost a couple of tiles off the roof and we've also lost a garden fence. After things calmed down, but before the power came back on, I took a walk around the village to see what other damage there was and was surprised to find there was remarkably little. I saw a couple of collapsed garden sheds, a couple of collapsed fences (one of which was impaled on a tree) and a lot of debris lying around. I only saw one damaged tree (part of this Willow had collapsed).

I took my cameras with me and took some pictures. Given that I can't rely on the power at the moment (it's still blowing a gale out there and it is forecast to get worse again before it gets better) I won't be downloading them until much later.

As usual I'm not recording wind speeds anywhere near like they really are due to the design and location of the anemometer. A personal station just down the road from me is showing far more accurate speeds (showing a maximum gust of 57mph as of the time of writing).

As much as I find it all interesting, I'll be happy when it's over.

Update: Here's an image of some damage that I took on my mobile phone (like I said above, I'll grab the images off the actual cameras when everything has calmed down):

Records for 2006

Now that I've got 1 year of data and, more to the point, now that I have data for a whole calendar year, I've extended the records section of the site to include the records for 2006. This includes min/max/average values for each month as well as the values for the whole of the year.