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.

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.

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).

New graphs and a new record

This morning I added a new type of graph to the graphs for today and yesterday. It's somewhat similar to the wind direction graph but, instead of showing the direction left to right, it plots it as a compass.

Edit: I've now added a compass graph for the last 7 days too.

I also had a bit of a record this morning. At 05:02 I recorded the lowest relative pressure value I've seen since I started running the station. The value was 972.4 hPa, just lower that the last record of 976.7 hPa on 2006-02-17 at 03:37.