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.
It's quite a frosty morning this morning. It got down to around -2.6°C at one point. I couldn't resist getting the camera out and taking a few pictures:
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.
Back in July I added some graphs that showed the last 150 days' worth of data. I wrote the code to generate them rather quickly and have not touched it since.
This evening I've made some changes to how they're generated (got rid of the user of gnuplot's smooth facility and have also added some labels) and I've also added two extra graphs: the wind chill and also the impact of wind chill (the latter being the temperature minus the wind chill).
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).
Just over a month ago I posted a number of photographs of a really nice cloud display I found when I wandered over to the office. I've now gone back through my CloudCam archives and made a movie of the images taken around the same time. This is the result:
I've just been looking back over some of the images captured by my CloudCam and stumbled on this little sequence:
The stats page on my weather station site has always had an all-time wind distribution table. The idea is to get some sort of idea of where the wind generally blows from at my location. While it does give that information it doesn't really have that "at a glance" feel to it that you really want.
This morning I decided that this data might also work well as a "compass graph":
I've been staying in London most of the week (in Barnet to be exact). For most of this morning the weather was pretty fine down there, a little breezy but other than that we had nice clear skies, very little cloud to speak of.
As I was getting ready to leave this morning, at just after 11:00 UT, a large dark cloud moved in, it started to rain and the wind started to pick up. Suddenly there was lightning, then the rain really started to hammer down, followed by sleet and then hail. Suddenly the wind got very intense, worse than any wind I've experienced before — it was so windy it set off pretty much every car alarm in the street. And then, almost as quickly as it had come, it eased off.
I was amazed at what I saw but didn't think too much of it after that (other than being amazed and impressed, what with me being interested in weather and all).
The next couple of hours were spent on the underground and then the train back up to Lincolnshire and in all that time I never got to see any news. Then, this evening, I turned on the TV to catch up with the news and caught this story.
From what I can tell, looking at the location of the tornado and looking at the direction the weather was moving in, it seems that what I experienced was the remnants of that tornado.
I've added a tools section to my weather station website. The idea is to make available some of the tools I've written that make the station work (at least those that have a chance of being useful to other people — a lot of the code I've written is very specific to my setup and it wouldn't make sense to publish it).
Yet more messing about with the wind compass graph. After having it up and running for a few days I started wondering what it might look like if I created a video of the graph building up over time. This is the result:
After adding a wind compass graph to my site's graphs, and then after improving them (with a bit of help from Tim), Tim's gone and nicked the idea for his own graphs.
Not only that, he's gone and added lots of cardioid graphs too. I'm not sure what they tell me, but they look kind of fun.
After adding the wind compass graphs earlier today I started thinking again about the problem of averaging the wind direction. Being able to produce a useful rolling average helps with the turbulence problem I get with high wind speeds and the compass plots had a minor bug in them when the wind was moving either side of north.
So, after a little bit of searching around on the net and not coming up with anything that useful (maths really isn't my thing so I find it quite hard to make sense of most materials), I hassled Tim and he came up with a couple of useful pointers.
A little bit of hacking on rollavg later and, I think, it's all working. I can now do rolling averages on wind directions and it doesn't seem to all fall apart when the wind is coming from somewhere up north (yes Tim, the pun was too good to miss ;)).
I've now tweaked the compass plots to show both 20min and 60min rolling average values and I've also reintroduced the rolling average lines back into the old wind direction graphs.
Hopefully, this time around, it'll all work sweet.
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.
As I headed out to work this morning I was greeted with a great display of clouds and had to dash back indoors and grab the camera:
At 10:41 BST today the base station of the WS3600 suffered another self-reset. This only lasted for about 3 minutes in total (including the time taken to reacquire data from the transmitter). The crash log has been updated.
File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, WS3600 Crash, WS3600 Reset.
At 20:27 BST today the base-station of the WS3600 suffered another self-reset. This only lasted for 1 minute so it won't show up in the All Missing Data section of the crash log but I have added it to the Witnessed Events section.
File Under: WS3600, Weather Station, WS3600 Crash, WS3600 Reset.
