New Ireland Weather Network. Weather Stations Wanted

Snowbie

Now this is the kinda exposure we need. Thanks Pat.

http://theweatheroutlook.com/twocommunity/forums/t/20353.aspx

Danno has a link in his sig on TWO also to the network. I started a thread on netweather but in the misc section but wont get too much traffic in there(ok too late and too tired was my excuse) but if someone can put it in there sig in the NW forum to get some exposure, please do so.

There are a few stations around the country that i cant get in contact especially up the north. If you know someone who posts on a particular weather forum with a site from anywhere around Ireland (North and South), send him/her the link to the network.

www.irelandsweather.com

Cheers.

gordonre

I now have WeatherLink installed on another laptop. I've had issues with this PC before where WL locked and Windows could not end the app or process. I since re-installed XP and I had the same issues tonight.

It seems it may have something to do with the screen turning off with the power settings. I have since disabled the screen from turning off. I now close the laptop and the screen does infact turn off but so far so good! Let's hope that WL does not freeze again. I'll check in the morning and again during the day while at work.

If it runs the whole day it should be good as last time it did not even last the morning!

If guys you spot anything dodgy in the data sent to the mesomaps just let me know!

Snowbie

No problem Gordon.

Ken is starting on the mods for gust and dewpoint so hopefully later today we shall have the new update.

Mothman

Snowbie, you're reporting thunderstorms.....

These text/icons current conditions are often as not incorrect and I'm questioning their inclusion. I know that weather display makes up its own and and others are taken from METAR producing sation which frankly can be 50-100 miles away

Snowbie

Mothman wrote: »

Snowbie, you're reporting thunderstorms.....

These text/icons current conditions are often as not incorrect and I'm questioning their inclusion. I know that weather display makes up its own and and others are taken from METAR producing sation which frankly can be 50-100 miles away

That was some storm, power and all went down. At least 50 CG and 100 IC. Funny that it didn't show up on radar, must have been localised..:D

I have an icon being used with the EIDW METAR seperate but using my solar sensor to update station icon and wind/rain/fog to overide METAR for my current condition. It's a whacky setup but it works well'ish.

I actually like the icon as the clientraw.txt use's your station display of your current condition or you can set up your forecast icon. It's a pity WL and VWS don't do the same but at least there is a much closer station to you in Black Briar showing a more accurate current condition than that of Dublin AP much further away.
EIME Casement is not supported in NOAA for some reason.

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml

Mothman

Snowbie wrote: »

I actually like the icon as the clientraw.txt use's your station display of your current condition or you can set up your forecast icon. It's a pity WL and VWS don't do the same but at least there is a much closer station to you in Black Briar showing a more accurate current condition than that of Dublin AP much further away.
EIME Casement is not supported in NOAA for some reason.

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml

Yes WD is probably quite reliable with the current conditions. I think using Dublin AP would be better than Casement for me anyway and once we get out of this current setup then maybe the conditions here and at Dublin AP will coincide more often.

Perhaps the text/icon can be dropped for some stations?
Its better to give no info than wrong info and BB (when online!!) covers my area to a degree.

Davis aren't doing much development with WL. Its thrown in with the datalogger. It is a reliable fairly straight forward bit of software which is the attractiveness of using it.

Deep Easterly

If I could make a suggestion about the actual map . Is there a chance that the county boundaries could be included on the map for the North, and the Border disregared, as well? It might make the map a little less "exclusive" so to speak towards anyone who might be joining from that particular region.

gordonre

gordonre wrote: »

I now have WeatherLink installed on another laptop. I've had issues with this PC before where WL locked and Windows could not end the app or process. I since re-installed XP and I had the same issues tonight.

It seems it may have something to do with the screen turning off with the power settings. I have since disabled the screen from turning off. I now close the laptop and the screen does infact turn off but so far so good! Let's hope that WL does not freeze again. I'll check in the morning and again during the day while at work.

If it runs the whole day it should be good as last time it did not even last the morning!

If guys you spot anything dodgy in the data sent to the mesomaps just let me know!

Sad to say after 5pm today WL hung again! Does anyone have any suggestions I can try?

What I have done is the following:

• Reformatted and installed XP fresh
• Have the lates updates including XP SP3
• Looked on Dell we page and there are no useful updates - one thing to mention this pc, Dell Inspiron 5160 is quite slow and has 128MB ram
• I also have AVG free edition and up to date!

I'm out of ideas. FYI - WL is ver5.8.1

Will post this on http://www.irelandsweather.com also.

Thanks!

Snowbie

Deep Easterly wrote: »

If I could make a suggestion about the actual map . Is there a chance that the county boundaries could be included on the map for the North, and the Border disregared, as well? It might make the map a little less "exclusive" so to speak towards anyone who might be joining from that particular region.

TBH with you Pat, i have try to avoid this as best i can in asking to create a universal Banner "Irish Weather Network" and to note " Serving the Island of Ireland".

Now the map was sent to Ken in a zip from my BMP image that is used with my nexstorm map and has the same boundary outline or lack of it that was created for me over six years ago. This however was not done intentionally as the country when signing up to nexstorm to have the map done was Rep of Ireland and the map was outlined for that purpose.

This is something i never copped and would make a huge difference when including a site from the north as it would be easier for me to place the site on the map with an outline of that county for reference.

Mothman

The lack of county boundaries in the North was very obvious to me the first time I looked. Different people look at things like maps or moths differently and pick up on different features

Mothman

I questioned the possibility of having the data more than an hour old visible but with some indication that it is older data.

The reply

If you all feel that data over 62 minutes old is valuable to display, I could make a two-tiered system with white for normal, bright-yellow for 62-to-122 minute old, and Offline for > 122 minutes old. I do have a concern that data over 62 minutes may not be meaningful if conditions change rapidly .. I know that a 2 hour difference in measurements here can be a +20F in the morning, and a -15F in the late afternoon if the sea breeze kicks in. It's one of the reasons why we poll stations at 5 minute intervals, and ask that uploads be done at 5 minute intervals so we can look at the map and see a fairly close representation of what is happening during that 5 minutes.

So is it desirable or not?

Mothman

See discussion

Having time stamp was raised.

Reply

There have been discussions about putting a time-stamp on the page to show the 'currency' of the data. The issue is that the data may be up to 62 minutes old for a particular station, and does that reflect 'current'? For that reason, I'd advised against putting a timestamp visible on the page to reflect 'now' as the actual data may be over an hour prior to 'now'.

My long winded response

While this is good reasoning, I feel it is a bit naked without some sort of time indication. One is left to ponder, is this up to date or not? and without indication there is always doubt (in my mind at least). So I think we need to combine Ken's reasoning to a time stamp, meaning the time is done in such a way, or clarification is given that the data may be upto an hour old so that viewers don't view the time as being the time of the data.

The options

How about I add the capability to display the age / last update time for each station's data into the collection, then it could be displayed in several ways:
1) could be a column in the table showing just the time
2) could be a mouseover field which would reveal the date/time/age of the observations
3) could be a line below the graphic saying something like
'Conditions data from hh:mm dd/mm/yyyy to hh:mm dd/mm/yyyy'

What do you think?

Snowbie has suggested option 1, and I think #3 would be good to have under map.

#2 is probably OTT

Snowbie

Mothman wrote: »

See discussion

Having time stamp was raised.

Reply


My long winded response


The options


Snowbie has suggested option 1, and I think #3 would be good to have under map.

#2 is probably OTT

I think we could maybe have both #1 and #3.
#1 will show each station last upload time and keep the data in use current.
#3 will show the last/next upload of the graphic.

Mothman wrote: »

I questioned the possibility of having the data more than an hour old visible but with some indication that it is older data.

The reply


So is it desirable or not?

Not really as from options #1,#3 above. If data at 62mins and over, offline will do. No point showing color schemes for each station if they fall in this catagory.

My 2c.

Supercell

Quin weather station claims to have a Webcam, but it doesn't (or its not linked to on the main site) , I feel cheated! I was curious to see what conditions are like there given the realtively warm temp reported and low humidity.

Snowbie

His application, he mentioned he has a webcam and the message he left was that he only recently updated his site and including new features , so maybe he will include it over time?

Mothman

Snowbie wrote: »

I think we could maybe have both #1 and #3.

This is what I was getting at, though I didn't spell it out.

Regarding the table below, data is not shown once station is offline.(ie data older than 62 minutes) I suggest than offline stations are listed in a separate table (so they don't clog up the various sorting features of main table), the time of last report would be listed.

I'm happy with currrent 62 minute cut off for offline, just not happy for the data to disappear all together especially when daily max/mins are listed.

Snowbie

Update,

Ken is doing the updates atm on our test page and has included #1 and #3 into the table and under the graphic. We have been discussing this for awhile.

You can also sort the table for time too by clicking on the header.

He has also included the DP rotating after the temp both on the graphic and in the table.

Also the wind gust has also been introduced. Needs a bit more tweaking maybe but coming along nicely. The gust will show at greater than 0 and as the max between a station upload interval.

He is also doing the conversion on the km/h, m/s, kts to show as m/ph.

Fire index has been removed.

He said he should be finished by the time i wake, (god only knows when i will wake:D)

Danno

Just a few things to note here for PWS owners.

Newbridge - Your pressure is constantly under reporting. The difference between yours and surrounding stations appears to be approx 3.5 to 4.0mb. We'd have constant gales in Portarlington and Naas if the readings were correct! Also, the humidity seems to be a tad lower than surrounding places by 5 to 10%.

Ballybofey - Again, humidity appears to be a little low, perhaps though you have mountains to your west meaning drier air coming down as opposed to Newbridge in the central plains. Sometimes your temperature is off also, yesterday a -74.6c was recorded. I know Donegal can get cold, but jeepers -74.6c is unreal cold!

Quin - Humidity being reported at 45% whilst nearby Shannon boasts 93%. Way out. Pressure here is also reporting 1mb lower than Shannon.

Athlone - Humidity being reported at 35% whilst nearby Birr reports 88%. Again, way out. Pressure here is also reporting 3mb lower than Birr. Your temperatures seem to be a tad high also.

Ashford - Temperatures reported at 20.4c seems very high. Checked that sat24.com and no blue sky there, infact there seems to be a cloud flow in off the sea.

Hope I'm not reading old data, but the pressure suggests I'm not. BTW I am not pointing this out to be some sort of thorn in the project, just some general observations I have made. No offence is intended.

I'm sure too that my own data is not the 100% either. I have a sneaking suspicion that my pressure reading is slightly high by 0.2 or 0.3mb. I will be keeping a close eye on Birr and Carlow reports for comparison.

Supercell

Theres something up at Ashford today for sure:-

Max 22.9°C at 10:54
Min -36.7°C at 11:31

Thats some diurnal range

Supercell

Snowbie wrote: »

He is also doing the conversion on the km/h, m/s, kts to show as m/ph.

I don't mean to be a moaning ninny, but why mph?, its not the unit of measurement used by the Irish Met office and we dont use it on our roads either.
Just my truppance worth.

Mothman

Danno wrote: »

Ashford - Temperatures reported at 20.4c seems very high. Checked that sat24.com and no blue sky there, infact there seems to be a cloud flow in off the sea.

Trust you to look at at time.
Doing some maintenance and tried changing the temp/hum sensor. Didn't work as expected and took station offline while I did further work. At least the 23C didn't get through:)
I'm hoping the humidity sensor will sort itself once it drys, but still stuck in the high 90s whereas it should be in the low 90s or high 80s now.
Generally humidity sensors don't last very long, a few years though seems to vary from less than 2 years to 10+ years.

Mothman

Supercell wrote: »

Theres something up at Ashford today for sure:-

Max 22.9°C at 10:54
Min -36.7°C at 11:31

Thats some diurnal range

Alas, they're stuck in the console and can't be edited :mad:

Mothman

Supercell wrote: »

I don't mean to be a moaning ninny, but why mph?, its not the unit of measurement used by the Irish Met office and we dont use it on our roads either.
Just my truppance worth.

Relunctantly I agree though I much prefer mph.

Its worth asking whether the facility of the viewer selecting units is an option, though I'd imagine it would be alot of work and if it was just for our network, I wouldn't push it.

Supercell

Sure you can, you just clear the daily max and min values, they will only go to the current one but that's better than those figurs screwing up your daily/monthly and yearly values.
Then manually edit the database for the missing time period in Weatherlink. I had to do it a couple of times when I was cleaning my station.

Sorry for editing your post Mothman, I clicked edit by mistake instead of reply

Mothman

Supercell wrote: »

Sure you can, you just clear the daily max and min values, they will only go to the current one but that's better than those figurs screwing up your daily/monthly and yearly values.
Then manually edit the database for the missing time period in Weatherlink. I had to do it a couple of times when I was cleaning my station.

Sorry for editing your post Mothman, I clicked edit by mistake instead of reply

Learn something new (or perhaps rerembered!) everyday!

Will try that now

Already edited WL

Snowbie

You are putting the console in setup first? I also remove the data logger before maintenance and clear the values so they won't register before placing the datalogger back in.

Over the week i have been looking at some strange readings from some of our sites across the country and wonder do the station owners know about these?

Temperature, barometric pressure and humidity seem to be reading erratically for some stations.
If your living on elevated ground, double check your height offset in WL against your console. Supercell are you calculating MSLP for your area?

I have been using the m/ph with the met.ie many years before they changed to km/h, in fact i don't agree with some of the changes generally being made but they have followed the new system put in place a couple years back for the entire country.

I'm reluctant to change as i just can't get my head around it, i will always convert the k/ph to m/ph imo and is my preference to keep that unit. Another user on this forum use's inches oppose to mm for measuring rainfall.

What about the user if they come onboard across the border into NI, they will use m/ph over k/ph?

I think it be worthwhile to have a unit selection tab maybe down the line and will put that to himself. Everyone will have their own unit preference for recording data.

Danno

So it wasn't just me noticing it then!

Snowbie

Your feedback please lads. I'm happy so far with it.

http://www.irelandsweather.com/IRLWN-mesomap-test.php

Mothman

Snowbie wrote: »

Your feedback please lads. I'm happy so far with it.

http://www.irelandsweather.com/IRLWN-mesomap-test.php

Brilliant!
Only issue is "IST" for time under map, if I read correctly

Deep Easterly

Deadly Karl

The nearest station to me on that map in SE Roscommon is showing a rh of 27% and a Dp of -0.1c! Rh here is 83% at the moment! The difference a few miles makes.

With the wind reading issue, would knots be more universal? I know I don't have a station up as yet, but I know that I would have a problem with the K/ph readings. My preferences, like MM's, would be Mph, and second would be knots, as even the Met use this on the latest updates.

Just my pointless opinion.