Catching up, and a crash

Not much has been happening since my last post, hence the reason I've not posted for some time.

The base station of the WS3600 has crashed three times, the latest being today, so this still continues to be a problem.

Also, the rain bucket still seems to be a little intermittent in the way it records rain (not that I've got it positioned in the best location).

Easter Sunday Snow and Another Crash

We've had pretty much no snow around here all winter but, last Sunday, we woke up to find that it was snowing pretty hard and, by the time it had finished, we had something like 2" of snow on the ground. It was enough to build a snowman in the garden although it did melt pretty quickly and by late afternoon there was almost no evidence that there'd been any snow.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

Also, on Sunday, the base station of the WS3600 crashed again. That's the second time this month.

UK Storm and other bits

Today's storm has been interesting so far, but not for the reasons I was expecting. For one thing, so far, at my location, it hasn't been quite so bad as I thought it might be. We've had worse winds recently (especially the storm a couple of days after the Lincolnshire earthquake) and, so far, it's nowhere near as bad as the January 2007 storm. The main reason why it's interesting is how low the pressure is at the moment.

As my weather station got up and running I noticed that, on and off, I'd get pressure spikes and dips – these would last for one reading, rarely two, and would throw out my graphs and stats. Because of this I added a little bit of "filtering" for the graphs and other things so they'd ignore values that seemed too hight or too low.

For no specific reason I'd set the low point of the filter to 970 hPa. When I got up this morning the pressure reading was already below that and still falling. Because of this I had to make changes to the code that creates my graphs, and also to the code that adds the data to my SQL database, so that the low point is 960 hPa. The pressure is still falling and I suspect I might need to change this again so that the low point is 950 hPa (this would result in a range of 950 hPa to 1050 hPa, which would actually fit rather well with the usual range mentioned on this Met Office page).

Edit: (2008-03-10 13:00 UT) Sure enough, I've just had to modify the minimum pressure filtering again to take it down to 950 hPa because the pressure has just fallen below 960 hPa.

In other recent news (I've not really written much on this blog recently, sorry about that) I've had a couple more base station crashes. The first was on 2008-02-28 and I lost about ½ an hour's worth of data. The second was on 2008-03-08. This is the first time in quite a long time that I've had two crashes so close to each other.

Records for 2007

The records for 2007 (including min/max/average values per-month and also for the whole year) are now online.

I now have weather data for two whole calendar years.