Thursday 28 June 2012

Violent rain 28th June

We were lucky really as this passed through in about 5 minutes.
There were two or three lightning strikes close enough by to trip the power out briefly.
Some places had rain like this for an hour or more causing flash flooding and transport disruption.


Tuesday 19 June 2012

VP2 set up

A couple of pictures of the Vantage Pro2 in place at the end of the garden.
The heavy wooden support pole is ex-telephone and the metal scaffold pole is about 6metres tall
I have a suspicion that high winds might bump the rain gauge enough to cause false tips, we shall see.
It might need to be mounted on its own pole alongside.

Though technically higher than it should be, being set at 4 feet within the garden would seem likely to give higher readings on sheltered sunny days and lower reading in mid-winter when the garden is often a frost pocket all day.

Edit: Strong winds seemed to be able to jiggle the rain bucket enough to cause a false reading, so I added a second pole for it,  isolating from the taller anemometer pole.
A little ugly but the other option of guy wires does not appeal.



Sunday 17 June 2012

1,000,000

Passed almost un-noticed!

Saturday 16 June 2012

Oh noes!

INSTALLING SUMMER..... ███████████████████████░░░ 95% DONE. 2 minutes left. Installation failed. 404 error: Please try again later.

Friday 15 June 2012

VP2 update

Today's heavy showers provided a good opportunity to tweak the rain bucket set screws and check the results - as I thought previously it seemed to be under-recording by almost 20% compared to the Vue and my older Oregon rain-only gauge.
I turned both screws about one and a half turns out, and though another day with significant rain is needed to be sure, it seems much closer now but still slightly lower if anything.
I must say I have always suspected the Vue read a little high if anything, perhaps due to the awkward leveling procedure when it's on a pole above your head it is quite difficult to get right.

This evening the site is actually showing VP2 data for now, I'll probably swap the VP2 into the Vue's position in the next few days on an 'uneventful' weather day.
A little thing I noticed is that the temperature changes more slowly up or down, I guess due to the larger enclosure and greater mass of plastic around it.
Otherwise the main difference is humidity is often about 4% lower.

Temperature and wind have often been uncannily almost the same for long periods which quite surprised me since the two ISS are currently some 30 metres apart.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

VP2 sensor arrives

Whoopee!

Two weeks in total but it's here - doesn't look much for the price ...

Will do some trials with the VP2 sender unit shortly before changing anything.


Edit: popped it in the enclosure this evening, and have put the VP2 ISS outside in a temporary location for now.
Currently it is reading 0.2C higher than the Vue, and the humidity is 4% lower.
This could easily be almost entirely due to the different location nearer to the house.
I know the rain gauge was working when I first got it, but tomorrow or Friday will give the chance  to calibrate it against the Vue.




Monday 11 June 2012

June monsoon season

There's been about 60mm of rain already this Month but it's worth noting June is often a rather wet Month and our average is over 100mm.
There is a tendency for springtime droughts caused by persistent high pressure to break down in June - not just over the UK but much of western Europe.
This is known as the onset of the European June monsoon season!
Obviously it's not technically a monsoon but there is statistical probability of unsettled spells with rain which can be much heavier at this time of year since the sun is very strong and more moisture can be held in the air.

Usually this is a temporary thing and though it can sometimes carry on cool and damp into July, in a half decent year there's a good chance that before the end of the month we'll see some of the hottest days of the year with a more settled spell becoming established.

On Sunday the 10th we had more than 7mm in heavy showers in the afternoon, but by 5pm sun was breaking through - but fog from the North sea was being wafted in a NE wind as seen in this picture from the Ralphs Cross road up 'Sugarloaf'.



Wednesday 6 June 2012

June weather thoughts

A picture included a little while back in this post
http://nymweather.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/may-continues-like-april.html
Is very much how things look now about a month later than last year!
June has started with well below average temperatures, but the last couple of days have been reasonable.
There will be an unusual stormy spell for the south and it will affect us to some extent during the next 2 or 3 days.
Next week will see some improvement here in the east with rain or showers being more concentrated toward the north-west.

Impressive software stability

This will probably jinx it, but for the first time ever the Windows 7 netbook which uploads and stores the weather data has run continuously for more than 50 days without restart.
Weather-Display resets the day counter after 50 so quite a notable event!
The WD software was last closed and restarted on 18th April so has also sailed past previous record runs and is now well over 2 million packets received.

Also the peculiar issue with the station battery saying it was low when it should not be has disappeared for now.
I see my (ordered from USA) VP2 Temp/humidity sensor has arrived in the UK and 'cleared customs' so should arrive by the weekend. Presumably there will be some tax to pay which may delay it depending how they do it.
Once before the courier depot would not load an item on the local van until a payment was made by credit card!