Separate Vantage Pro anemometer

I noticed a used Davis Vantage Pro 2 sensor array on ebay and since it only made £50 decided to get it to play around with.
It did not have a receiving console but my Vantage Vue console can receive the VP2 signal as they are all interchangeable.

It was not guaranteed working as the seller had no way to test it, so it was not unduly disappointing that the temperature sensor seemed to have failed.(It's £135 to get a replacement!)
However I was already aware the anemometer with wireless transmitter can be used as a way to improve accuracy with the all-in-one Vue unit which compromises wind measurements to some extent by being (usually) installed rather lower than is ideal.

So with a little playing around the Vue console is now receiving rain and temperature/humidity from the Vue unit on channel 1 and the wind direction/speed is on channel 2 from a separate VP2 unit.
The VP2 wind cups are set up significantly higher than the Vue and further away from trees which tend to shelter it especially from the north.

A further improvement would be to lower the Vue sensors to near the standard four feet for temperature recording.
This will also hopefully improve rain accuracy in windy conditions.
It's a known issue that an elevated rain collecting bucket will catch proportionately less of the rain falling as the wind increases.
Something to get around to on a day when it isn't cold and windy, as fiddling with tiny U-bolt nuts while up a ladder is not a good idea in such weather!

Here's a picture of all the VP2 sensors and transmitter.
The rain bucket is surprisingly large and is working but I'm not using it for now.
The solar powered transmitter has now been detached from the main assembly, and only has the anemometer cable running into it.

Satellite cloud - Europe

From the excellent Norwegian site www.yr.no

First bit of snow

It would not be unusual to see something like this in October, but here we are 4th December and this is the first few flakes seen - a few sleety showers and over the tops wet snow and a light covering.

Temperature touched 5.2C this morning but fell away through the afternoon with a frost looking very likely this evening.

By contrast this shot was taken on 2nd of December 2010 when we had about 18 inches of snow and many more snowy days followed through December.

Squall line 29th November

About 3pm a quite active cold front came through giving a brief burst of heavy lashing rain.
There was only about 2mm in fact.
The temperature dropped from near 12 C to about 6.7C in the space of 30 minutes.

Controlled heather burning at dusk

Spectacular but fully under control!

Computer hiccups

A few problems with the weather station computer lately, although no data has been lost, at times graphs on the site will have appeared broken or 'smoothed' as gaps are filled in with stored data from the Vantage Vue logger.

About the 2nd week of November, the netbook which stores and uploads data began stopping the software several times a day - it restarts itself if this happens but sometimes the gap can be at least 15 minutes so was becoming a problem.

I temporarily transferred the software to an old laptop, then completely re-installed the Netbook's Windows XP as it has been running continuously for more than two years - and seemed to be using too much resource just to tick-over.

After all the windows updates were applied, things looked good with lots of spare capacity and almost nothing installed except a fresh download of the weather-display software.
I replaced all the recorded data on the netbook, and it ran smoothly for about 24 hours, but then first thing in the morning everything had stopped - black screen and un-responsive keyboard but apparently the hard drive was running.

Pushing the shutdown button and restarting seemed to solve it and missed data was downloaded from the Vue logger.
I thought nothing much of this as there have been unexplained stalls a few times before.
However it then ran only 3 or 4 hours before stalling again!
It seemed as though the original continual re-starting issue was still ongoing but was now managing to crash the fresh install of XP!
Not good.

Further investigation and google-searching for similar problems suggested updating drivers would be worth trying. After doing that it has run continuously for more than 24 hours so maybe it has settled down again.
It does give a feeling of achievement to fix them but all to often there is much frustration involved!

Update, 24th December:
The Netbook and WD software went on to run continuously for almost a month after the driver updates were installed.
The data counter reached a record near 1 million but then there was a Windows update which needed a restart!

BBC weather Beta

http://beta.bbc.co.uk/weather/2634442

This is the new BBC weather website - you can select your location much more specifically than before, plus there is better detail on the daily forecasts.
Nice to see symbols much like they used to use on the TV forecast - before the current obsession with swooping about and animating things!

Trillions embed test

Mobile wap now available

http://weather.westerdale.info/wap

I've been testing a new mobile phone WAP page - URL above - and it seems to work for me - however I only have an old Nokia 3510i - as we have almost no phone signal at home!
So it would be interesting to hear if it works OK on more sophisticated devices.
The file size is less than 2kb, on orange PAYG set up on GPRS it only costs about 4 pence to look at the data.
You can't expect this to work in a normal web browser, although you can view it in a WAP emulator like http://www.inetis.com/index.php?module=ttemulator

You should see something like the emulator on the right.

Autumn sunshine

The end of September looks like being a memorable warm and sunny spell after a rather lack-lustre summer.

(Ex) Hurricane Katia

We luckily avoided the tail end of Irene a few days ago - which was quite serious on the east coast of the US - although recent windy and unsettled conditions were associated with that storm indirectly.

On Monday 12th there is a risk of winds topping 50mph as Katia *probably* runs across the north of Scotland.
At this stage it looks like we should miss most of the rain but should still expect some heavy bursts too. Combined with strong winds and cooler temperatures it will not be pleasant.
There is still a chance the storm might drive further south, affecting northern England more seriously - or it may slow or stall further away than currently expected.

This is nonetheless a 'classic' first significant autumn storm of 2011, and a reminder that summer really is over once more.

September

Only a few days into the month and already we've had some classic September autumnal scenes.
On Sunday 4th there was a little rain in the afternoon then after sunset skies cleared and as the temperature fell mist formed near the ground.

This sort of thing is perhaps more common around dawn.
It can transform a quite everyday scene into something spectacular.

Half million views

Sometime this week the page load counter on the main weather page (at the bottom!) will top 500,000 views.
This 'page load' figure isn't the total number of visits or visitors, but reflects a tendency for people to watch the conditions changing sometimes for quite lengthy periods.

Considering the site has only been online since March 2009 - and had very few views in the first few months - it is very encouraging to see such continued interest - thanks to all visitors!

Previous months in more detail

On the main site www.weather.westerdale.info you can view previous months and years on the drop down list - scroll down the bottom.
Another way to display this data in a concise way is on the Detailed Monthly reports.
There are so many of these pages already that I have yet to devise a simple way to access them, however you can manipulate the page URL in your browser address bar.

http://weather.westerdale.info/climatedataout62011.html
for example is the page for June 2011 - just change the numbers at the end to get other months and years - however some may be missing as you go further back.
If you particularly need a month in this format but cannot find it, I could probably recreate the page from saved data on the weather computer.
(However it only goes back to early March 2009!)

Met Office WOW

The Met Office started a new feature in June where anyone with a Private Weather Station (PWS) can upload live data to their servers.

Initially there were some teething problems but most things seem to work OK now.
The interface is similar in some ways to the Wunderground Wundermap.

Here is the WOW homepage.
www.wow.metoffice.gov.uk and Westerdale is at http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/latestobservationservlet?siteID=990721.

August rain storms

August is often a surprisingly rainy month - the heat of summer is still around, adding more energy to the weather sytems.
At this time of year it's not unusual for the UK to be affected by Atlantic storms which started off as Hurricanes or Tropical storms and have a great deal of moisture in their system.
For example August 2006 was very wet with 208mm recorded at Westerdale.

2011 seems to be following the plan, with unsettled periods giving 116mm at the time of writing (26th).
Today Whitby has had an exceptionally wet day for it's relatively sheltered location with more than 50mm since 8am.
http://classic.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=INORTHYO14
Here at Westerdale it seems to be petering out just short of 28mm today.

The chart below shows some quite cold air flowing down into the North Atlantic, while to the east hot and humid air heads north towards the Baltic.
The UK is covered in a rather flabby area of Low Pressure which given the contrasting air masses nearby is a perfect breeding ground for heavy precipitation.