We had a short, sharp and pretty intense rain band come over this evening and, in its wake, it left some interesting skies. I headed out with my camera to catch some of the sights and, without a doubt, the most impressive was this:
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.
This afternoon I was lucky enough to catch a display of a pair of sundogs and a circumzenithal arc. The arc was rather faint, nowhere near as good as the last display I saw. Despite this I grabbed my camera and tried to record what I saw.
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.
It's very stormy today, probably the worst I've seen in a long time, easily the worst I've seen since I started running the weather station.
We've lost power three times so far today. The first couple of times were enough for the UPS to handle but the third loss looked like it was going to be a long one so I shut the machines down (hence a a hole in the data today).
The wind during the power loss was quite scary — I'm having trouble recalling when I last saw wind like that. We appear to have lost a couple of tiles off the roof and we've also lost a garden fence. After things calmed down, but before the power came back on, I took a walk around the village to see what other damage there was and was surprised to find there was remarkably little. I saw a couple of collapsed garden sheds, a couple of collapsed fences (one of which was impaled on a tree) and a lot of debris lying around. I only saw one damaged tree (part of this Willow had collapsed).
I took my cameras with me and took some pictures. Given that I can't rely on the power at the moment (it's still blowing a gale out there and it is forecast to get worse again before it gets better) I won't be downloading them until much later.
As usual I'm not recording wind speeds anywhere near like they really are due to the design and location of the anemometer. A personal station just down the road from me is showing far more accurate speeds (showing a maximum gust of 57mph as of the time of writing).
As much as I find it all interesting, I'll be happy when it's over.
Update: Here's an image of some damage that I took on my mobile phone (like I said above, I'll grab the images off the actual cameras when everything has calmed down):
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.
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:
