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).
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.
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.
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.
Further to my earlier entry, the impeller in the anemometer has started working again. Some time after 13:00 this afternoon wind speeds were being recorded again. It would appear that today's rain and wind has finally cured the problem.
I'm still not sure if this was another case of heat causing a problem (initially this seemed possible given that when it first stuck we were having some very warm days, but the last couple of days have been much cooler) or if something had got stuck and the wind and rain has finally cleared it (I have noticed some webs around the anemometer so it's possible that a spider is to blame this time). It remains to be seen if the problem will return when winds are lower than they are now.
Either way I guess that, at some point soon, I probably need to get the anemometer down and give it a good clean (not such an easy job given where it's located).
Last Thursday I noticed that no wind speeds had been recorded. While it was a fairly calm day we'd also had the odd breeze and I'd have expected something to have been recorded during the course of the day.
Looking at the underlying data I noticed that I was getting data from the anemometer, that the direction was being recorded and was changing (for graphing and other purposes on the main site I "ignore" directions that have 0 wind speed). Using a binocular I watched the impeller for a short while and noticed that it just wasn't spinning (I also couldn't see anything blocking it). By the looks of things this was similar to a previous case of the impeller apparently getting stuck but, in that case, it seemed to be done to heat from direct sunlight.
I've been away for a long weekend camping and, when I got back on Monday evening, I noticed that the impeller was still stuck.
Over night, and this morning, it's been wet and windy and the problem is persisting. It would appear that, whatever has caused the impeller to stick, is something serious and isn't going to be cured by a period of wind and rain. So, until I have the time to get the ladders out and take the wind vane down (which will be a fairly large job as I'll have to cut away all the ties and stuff that are keeping the cable in place), it looks like my weather station is lacking any way of recording anything to do with wind.
The WS3600 base station suffered another crash during the early hours of Sunday morning. Annoyingly I didn't notice this until the afternoon so quite a bit of data was lost.
The WS3600 base station suffered another crash last Saturday. As with the previous crash it happened in the early(ish) hours of the morning so I lost a fair bit of data before I noticed that it had crashed.
During the early hours of this morning the WS3600 base station crashed (first time since 2007-01-21). This is, of course, extra annoying because it means I didn't notice it until gone 08:00 this morning so I've lost getting on for 6 hours of data.
At around 08:00 this morning I witnessed a reset of the WS3600 base station. There was a beep, the display cleared, then all LCD items turned on and then the backlight came on. Finally, after a short while, the display went back to normal and a minute or two later data was being received from the transmitter again.
Around 23:00 yesterday the wind vane settled on NW (315°) and sat there until around 07:00 today. I noticed this because the wind direction graph for most of this morning is a straight line:
It really is starting to look like the rain bucket is back from the dead. We've had some snow today, not as much some parts, but some. And, once again, the rain bucket has recorded something.
It might be too early to say so, but it really is looking like it's started working again all on its own. For the moment I've reinstated the rain graphs and data on the main site and I'll be keeping an eye on how things go.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 17th 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 27th of December (that was the same day that I started work on the main site).
