Check out how the icicle is bent because the Vermont Weather Stick mounted on the back of the house is rising, showing that the weather is improving. Meteorological Spring begins on Thursday, March 1. I didn’t really notice the Davis Weather station in the reflection until I had shot several frames. That machine says it is still 29 degrees here in Fairport.
This morning, I finished the installation of a wireless personal weather station at my house.
I ordered the Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus Wireless station from Ambient Weather.
The package that I chose included a WIFI router from Hautespot Networks and it connects wirelessly to my home network and sends data from the weather console in the house to the Web without the need to connect to a computer. Since I use Apple MacBooks (ie: laptops), I didn’t want to run a PC to constantly act as a server and send data to the Internet.
In order to separate the wind unit and the main weather station, I added an extra wireless transmitter to the package so that I could separate the two and locate both of them in different places. I also added a heater unit so that the rain collection unit won’t freeze in the winter time.
The anemometer is on a mouting pole on the apex of the roof and captures wind speed and direction. The wind data is send via a solar powered unit that sends a 2.4GHz wireless signal to a console in the house every second.
The main collection unit, the main part of the weather station, is mounted on a fence post in my back yard . It collects information on humidity, temperature, rainfall, rainfall rate, UV, Solar radiation and barometric pressure. These data points are sent from another solar powered 2.4GHz transmitter every second to the house where it then meets up with the anemometer data in the display console for display in the den.
The display console hooks to the wireless router and that sends information through my broadband connection to the Web.
The sites receiving and displaying the data are WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug, HamWeather and the CWOP network.
CWOP stands for Citizen Weather Observer Program and certain weather stations can feed that network data to be used to help with weather research by private, public and government institutions. I was assigned a station ID of DW3513.
Data sent to the CWOP program is analyzed and compared with nearby stations and the expected predictions for the area where a PWS is stores. Here is the page that shows the results of station DW3515.
Finally, there is a cool map called the WunderMap and also a full-screen real-time page from WeatherUnderground that is pretty cool too.
Flickr photos of the mounting locations and devices are posted as well.
We finally got packed up and moved out of AL last week. This pic was shot from the front porch at my in-law’s house one day when we weren’t packing. 98 degrees!!
As published in the newspaper this morning, Rochester, NY has seen 39.9 inches of snow in February, 20 inches higher than the month’s norm of 19.4 inches.
74.9 inches of snow have fallen on the Rochester area so far this season which is within a half-inch of the normal to-date totals.
The snow derby compares our two neighboring metros on the East and West of Rochester. So far this season, Buffalo has had 86.3 inches of snow and Syracuse has seen 105.4 inches of snow.
The normal snowfall for Rochester, NY for the entire season is 100.3 inches. More snowfall is in the forecast for tonight.
Let’s get going Rochester… We still need another 30 inches in order to reach “Normal”. Let’s shoot for 50!
Who wants to be just normal?
Ice Man, (Photo by BillBlevins)
One lens at a time, I’m rebuilding my camera bag! Here is a shot with my 70-200 f/2.8 that just arrived.
I also noticed that the Flickr to Blogger Beta crops the images, so you’ll have to pop over to my photo gallery to see the full frame.
