We have wind again

Further to yesterday's wind speed problem: at around 12:50 today the anemometer appears to have started working again.

Let's hope it was just a temporary glitch.

File Under: Weather Station, WS3600, Wind Speed.

No wind? Really?

Today, as of the time of writing, the WS3600 hasn't recorded a single instance of wind speed above 0mph (the last record was at 2006-07-17 20:17:06 BST with a wind speed of 0.2mph). This isn't so unusual, I've seen periods before when the wind speed has sat at 0 for a large part of the day before it finally picks up. To the best of my knowledge I've only once had a whole day of not recording any wind — and that was because of snow.

The temperature today is close to 30°C so I don't think snow's a problem.

What makes this really odd is that there actually is a nice breeze out there at the moment. The vane itself is turning around from time to time in the breeze, I am recording different directions, I'm just not seeing any speed at all.

Given that the breeze is light and gusty I suppose it's possible that the base station is just never catching it while the impeller is turning (and I think I've seen it turning, sort of hard to tell as it's quite high up) but I can't help but think that this is unlikely.

The other thing I'm wondering is if the heat is causing a problem. It's probably the hottest day I've had so far since running the weather station, could it be that the heat has caused the impeller to stick or something?

All that said, I'm not the only person with this problem. Tim, who runs a WS2300 up in Perth in Scotland, is also seeing the same thing.

Update at 16:52 BST: There's quite a stiff breeze out there now and I've been out to have another look — despite the wind the impleller isn't spinning at all. It would appear that, for one reason or another, it's got stuck.

Update at 17:41 BST: I've had a further look at the impeller with a binocular and I can't see that there's anything there that would cause it to stick (a nice fat bumblebee for example). There's a more-or-less constant breeze now and nothing's happening. At the moment it would appear that, one way or another, today's heat has caused it to stick (probably through something expanding).

File Under: Weather Station, WS3600, Wind Speed.

And now for some cryptozoology...

I knew the sky camera would come in handy. This morning, it managed to catch evidence of Rods flying around my own back garden! ;)

File Under: Rods, Cryptozoology, Webcam.

In the long run...

I've just added a new page of graphs to the weather site: the last 150 days. At the moment it only contains graphs for temperature, humidity, pressure and wind speed but I'll probably get round to expanding that at some point.

The graphs are updated daily, around local midnight.

File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, Graphs, Gnuplot.

One Stormy Morning

So far the revived CloudCam seems to be working pretty well. I'm still doing the odd tweak here and there and sometimes the exposure isn't quite what it could be but it's a lot better than the last attempt at getting something like this working.

This morning a storm came over my location so, as a test, I've made this little video from the captured images:

File Under: Weather Station, Webcam, CloudCam, Video.

CloudCam revived

Back in March of this year I had a play with setting up a CloudCam. In the end it didn't work out too well so I gave up on that setup.

Last night, after trying to revive the rain bucket, I decided to have another go at getting a CloudCam up and running. This time around I used an old Windows XP box and quickly wrote some code in Delphi to do the capture of images. I'm not considering it live yet (hence the fact that it's not on the menu of weather site yet) but CloudCam is up and running again – for the moment anyway.

This is just an experiment to see if I can get something working well with the new equipment and new software. If it doesn't turn out well I'll disable it all again. If it does I'll have it go "live".

File Under: Weather, Clouds, Sky Camera, Cloud Camera, WebCam.

Rain bucket back from the dead?

Ever since the rain bucket died back in April I've been meaning to open it up and have a look inside to see if there were any obvious problems. As often happens, it was one of those little jobs that just kept being put off.

This evening I finally decided to pop the top off and have a look inside.

I was amazed at how simple it is inside. I couldn't see any obvious problems. While there was some dirt in on the rocker I doubt it would have been something to cause a problem (besides, when the bucket first appeared to die, I made a point of causing it to tip and I could hear and feel it happen). Despite not finding any obvious problems I came into the office to find that 0.5mm of rain had been recorded. It would appear that the bucket is back from the dead.

Possibly.

One thing I would note is that it got tipped a few times while I was cleaning it and then putting the cover back on yet I only got 0.5mm of rain recorded. I don't know if this means it was a "lucky" one-off or if the base-station ignores too many tips in a short time. I'll give it another tip soon to see if I get more rain recorded.

So, fingers crossed...

Update: Hmm, perhaps not. I've been out and tipped the bucket again and nothing has shown up on the base station. It would seem that it was a one-off event. Now I'm confused again.

File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, Rain Bucket.

UK average wind speeds

While searching for something totally unrelated today I stumbled on an interesting little image: a map showing average UK wind speeds. The map is part of the BWEA's wind speed database page.

File Under: UK, United Kingdom, Wind Speeds, Map.

And another crash

After quite a long run the WS3600 has finally crashed again and, as with all other crashes, there's no obvious reason for it.

File Under: WS3600.

Atmospheric fun

Given that it directly relates to weather it seems sensible to post a pointer to this log entry on my astronomy site.

File Under: Atmospheric Phenomena.

Rain bucket dead?

I'm starting to think that the rain bucket had died. The bucket is in a less than ideal location, it's next to a building which will form a pretty good rain shadow so, often, a small shower or some light drizzle tends not to register. Because of this I'm used to getting no-rain readings when I might have expected something.

However, in the past 24 hours we've had a fair bit of rain and in the last hour we had a hell of a downpour (flooding in the road, drains not keeping up, that sort of thing) and nothing has shown on the WS3600.

On top of that, to try and be sure, I've just been outside and tipped the bucket by hand — I could feel and hear the rocker move but nothing has shown up on the base station. This would suggest that either something's wrong with the bucket, the cable or the main transmitter.

File Under: WS3600, Rain Bucket.

Crashing problem not solved — Another crash

It seems my recent optimism was misplaced. At around 09:22 this morning the base station of the WS3600 crashed again. The usual thing happened, there was a beep, the backlight came on and every single part of the LCD display turned on. It didn't reset itself and I had to remove the power to cause a reset.

So, it seems that the solution isn't turning off DCF77 support and the recent long run of working without a problem has simply been good luck.

File Under: WS3600, DCF77.

A Vortex or Two

Last Saturday was an interesting day from a weather watching point of view as I was witness to two different types of vortex.

Around noon that day, while walking around the village, I saw an unusual arc of cloud coming out of a bigger cloud. After watching it for a moment it seemed clear that the arc was, in fact, a rotating tube of cloud. A couple of other people who were with me watched and confirmed what I was seeing. We watched it for about five minutes as it "detached" itself from its parent cloud and head off on its own, finally appearing to "evaporate".

Later that day, probably some time around 18:40 BST, while driving up the A15 to Lincoln we drove into what appeared to be some sort of storm front. There was a very obvious line of cloud with rain falling from the leading edge and curving under the cloud. That was an impressive sight as it was. Then, as we got further under the cloud my wife pointed out an area of tight rotation within it. I had a look and could see it and commented that, if we were lucky, we might see a funnel cloud form. A friend in the car with us then pointed out that, under the area of rotation, dust was being picked up and spun around in the field below. We watched this for about 20 seconds as we drove past and then the movement in the field seemed to cease.

Sadly, in both cases, I didn't have any kind of camera with me and, in the latter case, I didn't think to note the exact time or location of the event. As best as I can recall I think it probably happened around here.

Annoyingly, at the moment, I can't find any online charts for the UK that show fronts and the like for around that time. My suspicion is that what we saw was a cold-core funnel cloud starting to form so it would be nice to check if there was a cold front in the area at the time.

File Under: Funnel Cloud, Vortex, Storm.

Crashing problem solved?

Tomorrow it'll be a month since I last had the base station crash. That's quite a significant period of time given that, before now, it was happening every couple of weeks or so.

So, what's changed?

Well, around the time of the last crash I was also having another problem with the base station: every so often the date and time would go way out — sometimes years into the future, other times years into the past. This seemed very odd given that the WS3600 uses DCF77 to keep the date and time correct. Suspecting that the problem was with the DCF77 update I decided to turn it off for a while and see what happens.

Since turning it off I've not had the date and time go wrong and I've not noticed a reset of the base station and I've not had a crash. This could be coincidence (and knowing my luck the bloody thing'll crash the moment I post this) but, so far, it's starting to look like these two issues might be related.

File Under: WS3600, DCF77.

GMT -> BST — and some wind issues

Last Sunday, here in the UK, we turned our clocks forward an hour from GMT to BST. This was a bit of a significant event for my weather station setup because, when I first started work on the tools that would pull the data off it and present it on the website, I decided that local time (rather than Universal Time) would make more sense. For reasons I won't bore anyone with it was important that I selected one or the other as the primary method of dealing with time and given that weather data lends itself more to how we portion up our days local time was the choice that won.

There were a handful of minor problems, all of them were to do with presentation and, in each case, they were to do with the fact that I'd written some code that assumed UT rather than GMT/BST. As far as I can tell each of these issues is now dealt with and things are displaying correctly.

Of course, the real test will be the switch from BST to GMT. Skipping forward an hour is one thing, skipping backward an hour is quite different.

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The last 24 hours or so has been very windy over the UK but you wouldn't really know it by looking at the data from my weather station. The maximum speed I've recorded in that time is 19.5mph — I'm pretty certain that we've had sustained speeds greater than that and we've easily had gusts over that.

I've read in a few places (including a comment someone placed here) that the vane/anemometer that comes with the WS3600 heavily under-reports wind speeds and this would appear to be the case.

Watching the vane yesterday I'm wondering of the problem all comes down to it using an impeller that has to be turned into the wind by the vane. Consider this graph of wind direction from the second half of yesterday:

I would have said that yesterday afternoon and late into the night had far stronger wind speeds than during the first half of the day. Notice how there is no clear direction in the image above? I noticed this while watching the vane, the stronger the wind the more it gets blown around, the less it faces into the wind. If it isn't facing into the wind the impeller isn't going to be getting the full force of the wind and will generally under-report the speed.

Without actually looking into this (something I've not done but will at some point) I'm guessing that a separate cup anemometer and vane setup is a better solution than an impeller attached to the vane.

To be fair, I've not got the vane placed in the most ideal location and this might also have something to do with what I'm seeing. While the vane is above all the nearest obstacles there's no useful way I can have it high enough that it's above the height of my house and the house next to me. It's not close to them, but I'm sure there's still plenty of turbulence off them. Again, in this sort of setup I'm guessing a separate cup anemometer would be a better choice.

File Under: GMT, BST, Daylight Saving, WS3600, Wind Speeds.

Got the bits

The bits I ordered a couple of days back have turned up. I just quickly stuck one of the propellers on the motor, wired it up to the solar panel and went outside while there was some sunlight about and.... it worked!

That's not to say it's going to solve my problem, but I could feel a breeze off the propeller so in the confined space of the shelter it might just make a difference.

I don't know when I'll get to actually work on this, and I need to figure out how best to hook it all up and how to site it in the shelter — and being the sort of person who knows very little about electrics and related matters it might take some time.

File Under: WS3600, Shelter, Temperature, Thermometer.

Toy fan

After this morning's apparent failure of the shelter to solve the temperature reading problem I got to thinking some more about how the problem can be solved. One option would be to have some sort of fan that would keep the air moving in the shelter — I don't know how well this would solve the problem but it's something that's got to be worth a try.

So, how to go about it? I guess the obvious solution would be a PC fan with a power supply and I'll probably look into that at some point. However, I've been looking for an excuse to order some fun things from MUTR so I had a quick look for some ideas on there. One little shopping trip later and I'm wondering how much fun can be had with a solar panel, a small motor, a polythene fan and a miniature impeller blade. I'll find out soon enough.

Heck, there's even a chance that mucking about with such toys will result in some sort of solution.

File Under: MUTR, WS3600, Solar Power.

First test of the shelter

Almost as soon as I comment that I've not had a test of the shelter yet the Sun comes out. It's quite cloudy out there and, even in the gaps, it's thin cloud, but there is sunlight falling on the shelter.

And, so far, it looks more of a failure than a success. As of the time of writing (around 09:13 local time) the temperature has gone up to 6.1°C from a starting point of around 4.5°C (and it appears to still be rising).

Looks like I'm back to the drawing board again. I guess the next stop is to look into the idea of turning the shelter into a fan aspirated shelter.

Oh well, at least the transmitter is protected from the elements...

File Under: WS3600, Shelter, Temperature, Thermometer.

Gimmie Shelter

Yesterday I finally got around to installing the shelter and moving the thermometer (which is also the hygrometer and transmitter) into it.

It wasn't such a difficult job either — took just under an hour. To be on the safe side I disabled the downloading of data from the base station while I did the work (you can see the gap in the data here). I did this because I was going to be handling the thermometer and also unplugging the anemometer and the rain bucket — given that no data would be coming from them there was a chance that odd values could have been recorded. The only error to come out of the exercise (so far anyway) was a record of 0.5mm of rain; chances are I nudged the rain-bucket while getting the ladder in place and this would have caused a tilt.

So far, so good. One concern was that putting the thermometer in the shelter would mean that it didn't record lower temperatures so well but the values recorded over night look pretty much okay. Right now the external temperature is showing as 0.9°C — exactly the same as the little Maplin internal/external thermometer is showing. My nearest personal weather station is currently showing 0.4°C.

The real test will be what happens when it's sunny and sunshine is falling on the shelter itself. It's totally overcast at the moment so it looks like I won't be able to test that today. Unsurprisingly the forecast for a large part of this week seems to be more of the same so I might have to wait a while to see if the shelter solves the problem.

File Under: Personal Weather Station, WS3600, Shelter.

CloudCam: The Movie

After this morning's problems the camera seemed to settle down a little bit. The image has been far too dark all day but most of the time you could see the clouds and the light levels of the images did seem to relate to the light levels outside.

So, now that I've got a whole load of jpeg files sat in a directory, what to do with them? Easy, take one copy of ffmpeg and make them into a movie!

Note that it's a .mov file and that it weighs in at around 2.2MB.

If I can get the camera to actually behave itself and if I get an interesting weather event happening this might be one interesting additional way of recording it.

File Under: Weather, Clouds, Sky Camera, Cloud Camera, WebCam, ffmpeg.