As many people know, weather stations are my specialty. I’ve been busy with inventing a number of things as of late, trying to stay competitive. So thought I’d drop this out there in case anyone has a use for either of these new solar powered weather station systems mentioned below. The US Fish and Wildlife Service just bought one of these for a special project to monitor the weather long term at a sensitive wildlife area. Nothing else would do the job for them. The software is off the shelf, but the system design and production is of my own design.
New Solar Powered Cellular Weather Station allows you to put weather data online from almost anywhere.
Full featured weather monitoring capability, supports all basic weather data, plus can be expanded for additional data such as solar radiation, evapo-transpiration, etc. Uses the rugged Vantage Pro2 and Vantage Pro2 Plus cabled models. Includes iPhone and Android apps.
Guaranteed compatibility with 3G/4G cellular networks in the USA plus international cellular networks including Canada and the UK.
The Cellular Weather Station Features:
- Full featured weather monitoring capability, supports all basic weather data, plus can be expanded for additional data such as solar radiation, evapo-transpiration, etc. Uses the rugged Vantage Pro2 and Vantage Pro2 Plus cabled models.
- Guaranteed compatibility with 3G/4G cellular networks supported in this list. Supports international cellular networks including Canada and the UK.
- Dual panel solar power battery system will power weather station and transceiver for up to 4 days in total darkness.
- A complete ready to run weather station web page showing the most recent data, plus automatic data archiving.
- No FCC license is required to use these stations.
- Plug and Play operation. No specialized setup or tuning is required to establish the cellular data link.
- All system electronics come pre-assembled in a NEMA rated weatherproof case with o-ring seal and locking hardware. Includes internal electronics ambient temperature monitor that reports automatically with other data.
- Ruggedized high quality construction – designed to withstand harsh remote environments.
- Modular design allows for easy shipping and transport.
- Complete systems with a weather station include WeatherView32 Professional weather monitoring software for additional data logging, web output, report generation, and alerting via email, pager, cell phone when weather conditions exceed levels you specify.
- iPhone and Android weather data display apps included
- Comes with guy wire kit for stability
The system includes a LIVE WEATHER WEB PAGE with automatic data logging that you can check from anywhere.
Setup and view on any computer, PC/Mac/Linux/Android/iPhone and post your weather data directly to the Internet without a dedicated always on PC. Once the CWS is operating, within minutes, you’ll be able to see your weather data live on the Internet.
Data display features:
- Selectable data logging intervals from 1 minute to hours.
- Automatically upload data to third-party weather sites including CWOP, the GLOBE Program, and Weather Underground..
- Download the data to your PC for all the powerful charting, graphing, and analysis.
- Apps for iPhone and Android monitoring included
- Add extra user license kit to download the data independently to multiple PCs—ideal for schools, agriculture, scientific fieldwork, and remote locations.
See the full details on the Cellular Weather Station
The CWS complements our Solar powered Long Range Wireless Stations – with point to point range up to 30 miles. See the details
I was in the Canadian rockies a few days ago, lake Maligne near Jasper, and saw what may be one of Anthony’s new product range – a cellular toilet. On an island in the lake there is a stone-brick toilet with solar panels on the roof, electrically self-sufficient and at 250,000 dollars the most expensive out-house possibly in the world. Looks like a good money-earner! /sarc off
@Johanna
> Really, a 1942 algorithm is still widely used?
Probably not used much by professional meteorologists, but seems to be used a lot in the mass-consumption, Walmart-class (and higher, like Davis) weather boxes, which tend to use low-end microprocessors like PIC, where code and data space is very limited.
The pros use codes like the NCR WRF system (http://wrf-model.org/index.php), which a decade or so ago required a Cray or similar super-computer to run. Home computers are more powerful now, so a reasonably equipped personal computer could run these codes. WRF is free software. You can download it here:
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/downloads.html
… but to requires considerable skill and knowledge of FORTRAN compiling etc to get it running on real data.
A better alternative for aspiring amateur meteorologists would be to interactive with WRF on line using Joe Murgo’s nifty web page (http://webpages.charter.net/wxjoe/animator.htm) which lets you interact with different weather forecasting models and create animated weather maps. A lot of these models are WRF-based, using state of the art “Data Assimilation” algorithms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_assimilation), which take prior conditions as baseline and assimilate new observations for predicting future states of the model.
Steve in SC says: “What is your recommended calibration interval?”
I can’t recall anyone ever discussing calibration intervals. For weather stations in general, especially the ones used to calculate “global warming”, how often are they calibrated, and are the calibration dates recorded with their data? And can we simply ignore weather stations and data that has never been calibrated properly?
I’ve been using Open2300 (http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/bin/view/Open2300/WebHome) on a LaCrosse Ws-2300 for several years now (http://classic.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=05341). The station is up on the roof with a 900 Mhz radio to the console.
Had to mod the source code to filter out errant readings, but that’s why we have access to the source…
Also built a web page for a Vantage Pro (http://www.swantown-wifi.portolympia.net/), uses a Troy Serial/Ethernet convertor to talk to the remote VWS server. you can also add a very cheap Ubiquiti WiFI link (http://www.ubnt.com/) to extend the range for at least 30 km.
@jaymam:
I can’t speak for all the weather networks, but for CWOP (Citizen Weather Observation Program) which has about 7,000 stations, the calibration is performed by the network administration and consists of periodic quality control checks, comparing each station’s average performance to nearby stations. Stations which pass the tests are rated “OK” (black dot on MesoWest), those with deficiencies are rated with a “CAUTION” symbol (orange dot), advising that some data may be incorrect. http://www.wxqa.com/aprswxnetqc.html
Some deficiencies are easily corrected, such as normalizing air pressure to sea level by adjusting an offset parameter. Others, such as equipment malfunction are harder to fix.
Here’s the last QC report for my station, which has consistently been rated “OK”.
http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/cgi-bin/wxqchart.pl?site=AU006
😐
@ur momisuglyJohn Day – Many thanks for that, John, now I have something to hunt down and get my teeth into. I’m less surprised than some at the age of the algorithm, as it dates it firmly in the Traditional Uncorrupted Science era; better still, if it can fit on a slide rule it will probably fit in a modest memory – electronic or mine!
And I’m pleased to say that, like Johanna, I have a nice practical implementation of that ‘simplest’ algorithm, which has been doing its thing for darn near as long as the Sager algorithm. Come to think of it, do I need to make a complicated electronic thingy? … 🙂
@Steve C
> … if it can fit on a slide rule it will probably fit in a modest memory
Yes, the algorithm is seems to be very compact, and doesn’t need many input features.
http://www.weather-above.com/Sager%20Algorithm.html
But, the wind “direction change” and “Clouds” feature values it needs aren’t automatically provided by a “standalone” most home weather stations:
Wind
Direction=(Calm, N,NE,E,SE,S,SW,W,NW)
Direction change=(Steady, Backing, Veering)
Pressure
Mean Sea Level= inches HG
Trend = (rising-rapidly, rising-slowly, normal, falling-slowly, falling-rapdily)
Clouds
Cover=(Clear,Partly-Cloudy,Mostly-Overcast, Overcast,Rain)
Backing and veering winds reflect a change in wind direction with altitude, so not clear how a single anemometer could figure that out. Perhaps there’s a heuristic for estimating the advection and rotation from short time series samples. Or maybe one could use the variance of the wind direction as a crude proxy for this.
Also you would need a solar radiation sensor to infer cloud cover. They’re readily available, but not usually included in the typical home weather station. Again, maybe one could use short term variance in temperature as a proxy for cloud cover.
In any case, I think I would try to come up with my own algorithm with whatever features my station provided, using local historical forecasts extracted from NOAA archives and time-series or decision-tree modelling tools. (R, Weka etc).
Oregon Scientific has a wireless weather station that you can interogate up to 10 combination temperature /humidity sensors. To do that you have to knock off the other included sendors (barometer, wind, etc). Range is posted as 100m with no obstructions. There is software to download data, but I couldn’t determine from the info if it’s continuous or not.
http://us.oregonscientific.com/cat-Weather-sub-Professional-Weather-Stations-prod-Pro-Wireless-Weather-Station.html
For data logging capability:
http://us.oregonscientific.com/cat-Weather-sub-Professional-Weather-Stations-prod-Professional-Weather-Center.html
The reason you didn’t get a red squiggly from your browser on that is that a cleaver is a food chopper. Not too clever! ;p