The Official AWC Weather Station
| 
| 
|
For more detail, see CurrentConditions
Instruments
In August 2005 I installed a Davis Vantage Pro2™ weather station at our home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In December 2005, I added the WeatherLink® datalogger and computer software. Thus, the AWC Weather Station was born and online!
The outdoor sensor suite (ISS)
The outdoor sensors consist of the basic ISS (Integrated Sensor Suite) with a tipping bucket rain guage and sheltered temperature and humidity sensors, and an anemometer and directional vane. The indoor console has temperature and humidity sensors and a barometer.
IN-AL-39In January 2010, I became part of the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) and received a manually operated 4" rain gauge. Currently, it is attached to the same post as the ISS; on the previously unused left side (as viewed in the photo above). The gauge sticks about 3" above the top of the green post. I hope the gauge is far enough from the anemometer to be outside it's rain shadow; which, given the relative position of the instrument post and the house, would only occasionally even fall in the direction of the new rain gauge. My CoCoRaHS station id is IN-AL-39 (i.e. the 39th CoCoRaHS rain gauge installed in Allen County, Indiana). In addition to rain, I also report snowfall, snow depth, and hail information to CoCoRaHS; all of which is archived on the CoCoRaHS website. Simply click on the View Data link near the top center of the webpage, pick the data set, and enter my station id.
When compared to the co-located CoCoRaHS rain gauge, the Vantage Pro2 rain gauge fairly consistently under-reports liquid precipitation by 10%, when it is working properly. Small things like pine needles in the bottom of the bucket can direct the stream of water completely away from the tipping mechanism inside and cause the Vantage Pro2 to record zero precipitation when the CoCoRaHS rain gauge has 0.25 or more inches (until I notice the discrepancy and clean out the bucket).
Bottom line, you will always get a more accurate picture of the precipitation that falls at my house by reviewing the CoCoRaHS data set.
Sub-freezing Precipitation
My rain bucket is not heated, so precipitation amounts are unreliable during winter months. When there is a warmup after a long period of subfreezing precipitation, the precipitation amount for that day will include the melted equivalent of whatever fell (and remained) in the bucket since the last time it was above freezing.
Less than 4 inches of snow will fit in the rain bucket; and much of that often blows out or sublimates before it melts. So, total precipitation amounts reported for winter months will almost always be less than the melted equivalent of the actual precipitation for that month.
However, data in my Data Archive is manually adjusted for winter precipitation. I estimate melted water equivalent of snowfall, calculated from my "new snow on the ground" measurement and the average observed temperature during the snow event, using this table from the National Climatic Data Center.
Also, as you can see from the photograph (right), my anemometer can be encased in ice during freezing rain events and, thus, cease to record observations of wind speed or direction. Additionally, snow can become caked in the anemometers cups and affect wind speed readings.
Location and its affects on Wind Speed & Direction
I attached the ISS to a 4"x4" post, located about 2' north of the northwestern corner of our deck. The instruments are about 6' above ground level (4½' above deck level), with grass and mulch directly underneath. I debated about the placement of the anemometer/vane, but decided to install it on the same post with the ISS. My two primary reasons for this decision: 1) I don’t have a ladder that reaches to my roof, and 2) I really wanted to know what the wind was where I live, not 25-30' off the ground. So, my wind speeds will be somewhat less than what would be officially recorded here, and the wind direction is skewed by local obstacles (houses and trees). Someday, I may get a ladder or have access to one and decide to re-locate the anemometer; or I may not.
Google Earth View --- the red dot shows ISS location
From the above view, you can see that the house blocks the ISS to the south and southeast, there are trees a little further to the west and west northwest, and another house a little further to the northeast. Except for swirling, the location should favor southwest, north northeast, and easterly winds.
The location of the ISS, according to Google Earth, is 41.1338N, 85.0307W at an elevation of 784' / 239m (Google Earth) or 792' / 241m (Allen County Survey).
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Availability of Data
Data provided on awcfamily.com:
- Current Conditions, data on this page is updated every five minutes (except when my computer or my internet connection is down)
- $CurrentMonthText Summary, data on this page is updated shortly after midnight daily
- $CurrentYear Summary, data on this page is updated shortly after midnight daily
- Data Archive, data on this page is a bit out-dated.
In addition to this website, data from my weather station is uploaded for personal and research use to two other websites.
Citizen Weather Observer Program
The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is a private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality. The CWOP collects data from over 4500 nongovernmental weather stations and transmits it to the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) that NOAA provides for the purpose of improving weather forecasting, by providing support for data assimilation, numerical weather prediction, and other hydrometeorological applications.
My CWOP call sign is CW4824; current and historical data can be viewed at
findU is a database archiving weather, position, telemetry, and message data. The primary source of data is an amateur radio system called APRS, some weather data comes from an internet based system called the Citizen Weather Observer Program. This large (>50 GB) database is constantly updated (about 20 new reports come in every second), and is accessed via a number of dynamic web pages.
An analysis of the accuracy and reliability of my weather station (based on other MADIS data in the area) is provided at weather.gladstonefamily.net.
Weather Underground
My data is also part of the Personal Weather Station network (currently including over 12000 personal stations worldwide) maintained by the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground provides succinct, but extensive, reliable and accurate weather information --- data, imagery, forecasts, and weather advisories (watches and warnings) --- for over 60,000 U.S. and international cities. They also provide extensive information on tropical weather (hurricanes, typhoons, etc.) around the world. You can access most information for free; though you do get advertisements with your weather. Fortunately, they do not use popups (perhaps the most annoying method of advertising on the web, though flash animations that suddenly produce sound when your cursor passes over them are a close second).
For a very modest fee ($10/year as I write this), you can get advertising-free access, longer radar animations, "universal" favorite cities (you just save your favorite cities once and can access them easily from any computer you go to), and weather forecasts and warnings via email. It is one of the few websites that I am willing to pay for.
My Weather Underground station ID is KINFORTW9; current and historical data can be viewed at
Current Data Recording and Analysis Software
In April 2009, I transferred my Vantage Pro2 serial connection to a Linux (Fedora Core 10) computer running wview. That computer was 9 years old and suffered a hard disk crash in late 2009. So, since December 2009, I run the latest version of wview on an Ubuntu virtual machine, this virtual machine is run within VMware Player on my 64-bit Vista workstation (on which I had to install a serial port card).
The wview graphics are much nicer and are created much more quickly than WeatherLink’s. In fact, even though the computer hardware was identical to the original computer running Windows and WeatherLink, all aspects of wview were quicker than WeatherLink. Also, wview natively handles uploading to CWOP and WeatherUnderground (i.e. without a third-party plugin). Even within a virtual machine, the performance is still much better and the load on the host computer much less than with WeatherLink.
Old Data Recording and Analysis Software
As mentioned earlier, I originally used the data recording, analysis, and uploading software that came with the Davis WeatherLink® datalogger.
The WeatherLink software has a tendency to hang or crash every so often. I have the serial port version of the datalogger at home and (in a previous job) the USB version at work. The serial port version worked much more reliably than the USB version; but I still wanted something that would automatically restart the WeatherLink software when it crashed. One of the most promising ones I found online is StartWatch, a shareware program that lets you coordinate the startup of your applications and monitor them after they're started.
At that same website (SoftWx.com), I noticed a program called VirtualVP, a shareware program that lets you connect up to 4 weather programs to a single Davis Vantage Pro 1 or 2 weather station (console or Envoy).
It turns out that using VirtualVP seems to alleviate the extra problems with the USB version of the datalogger. Couple that with StartWatch, and my weather uploading from work went flawlessly for months. However, shortly after I left that company, the data uploads ceased; and since I had no access to their computers, I could not determine the problem nor fix it.
It also improved the uptime from home; however, it seems my router, cable modem, and/or Comcast (my old ISP) were not quite as reliable and occasionally put WeatherLink into such a funk that not even StartWatch could get it to terminate cleanly so that StartWatch could restart it. Still, StartWatch and VirtualVP provided great value for the low registration fee.
Also from SoftWx.com is a freeware program called VPLive that connects to a Davis Vantage Pro 1 or 2 Weather Station console (either directly or through VirtualVP) and displays the live data. It also calculates the station pressure (i.e. actual pressure), altimeter pressure, and running averages needed to properly generate and send APRS/CWOP data. So, I used that (instead of WeatherLink) to upload my APRS/CWOP data. I'd have liked VPLive to also upload to WeatherUnderground; I once submitted a request for that to VPLive's author, but it was still on his to-do list a couple of years later. Of course, now I no longer care since I use wview on Linux.
|  IN-AL-39 |
