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!