Tucker in the snow, originally uploaded by sailorbill.

]]> http://www.billblevins.com/2010/02/tucker-in-the-snow/feed/ 0 http://www.billblevins.com/2010/01/2009-2010-new-york-snow-derby-142010-update/ http://www.billblevins.com/2010/01/2009-2010-new-york-snow-derby-142010-update/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:46:36 +0000 Bill Blevins http://www.billblevins.com/2010/01/2009-2010-new-york-snow-derby-142010-update/

Rochester Snow Derby totals as of 1/4/2010, originally uploaded by sailorbill.

Here are the Rochester Snow Derby totals as of 1/4/2010 comparing the season’s snowfall levels for Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester and Albany, New York. The local TV station used to have a link to this on their site which they continually updated but I can’t seem to find it at the moment. http://GoldenSnowball.com/ seems to be updated every day. The numbers are slightly different from the photo I took of the TV screen last night.

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.