Weather Station On-Line

This posting may only be of interest to one blog reader (Dorry), but that's good enough reason to do it.

Norris decided to add some hardware and software to his weather station so that the weather data can be displayed in a number of different ways on his computer screen.   The weather data is also sent to a weather site on the Internet.  The hardware addition was a data logger module and cable that connects the weather station console to the computer.  The software being used is the Virtual Weather Station (Internet version).  The on-line weather data is posted every 3 seconds to the Weather Underground website.  Weather Underground (also known as Wunderground) is a network of thousands of home weather stations across the county that all post their weather data to the Wunderground web site.  

This is a screen capture of the weather display on Norris's computer.  Its a very flexible interface that allows you to display many different weather parameters in many different ways over any length of time.  Norris is still experimenting with various sorts of displays, but for right now this is the fairly simple set of displays he has selected.  You should be able to click on the screen below for a larger view.

To see how the weather data is displayed on the Wunderground website, go to this link:
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KNCWEAVE14
or simply click on the Hawks Landing Weather on the right side of the top of the blog, underneath the bear picture.

You can see that the weather data can be displayed on the Wunderground site for a day, a week, a month, or a year at a time.  For now, there is no history before the first of June since that is when the software was installed, but as time goes on the history will build up.

Over on the right hand side of the Wunderground page, you can see the ""Nearby Weather Stations" map that shows the location of our weather station in Hawks Landing (station 60 on the map).  The nearby station at location 62 is the weather station at the Reems Creek FD.  If you click on the "Satellite", then click the + button five or six times, you can actually see our house.

Just under that, in the section called "About This Station", you can see location information for our weather station as well as a photo.  If you click on the photo, you can enlarge it to full screen.

The Virtual Weather Station software also makes it possible to add your weather to any web page, so that's how we now have our weather permanently attached to the top of our blog page.