(periodically) UNDER CONSTRUCTIONPage started 10/19/2004.
The above desplay is not real time and does not automatically update. It is loaded when the page is loaded, and the data contained can be up to 5 minutes old at that time. If you have had the page open for a while, to see the most current data hit your refresh button or F5 in Internet Explorer. The display is also a link to my stations weather history at http://www.wunderground.com, clicking on the display will take you to my data on that web site.
Our Weather Station.
And, since I was going to have a station, why not have the information online? I really only put it online so that I could check it from any computer in the house, not so that other people could see our weather.
When I started looking for software and hardware I found that there are a whole lot of private weather stations on the Net.
It turns out there are a bunch of different weather stations, made by a lot of different manufacturers, that support an interface of some type to a computer.
There is also a lot of different software that supports putting data from a weather station on some kind of net, be it a LAN or a server on the Internet.
The hardware.
The hardware used for our weather station is a cabled Davis Instruments Vantage Pro 2. This is the basic unit without the UV or Solar sensor. The VP2 is a good basic unit that is about as good as you can find for under $800 USD.
Depending on the category being measured, the update rate is anything from 1 second to 50 seconds. Updates to the web on these pages happen from once every 3 seconds (on the Weather Display Live page) to once every 60 seconds (most of the other pages).
The software.
The displays this page links to are currently being uploaded and handled by a program called "Weather Display". This program can be downloaded from http://www.weather-display.com the program cost about $70 USD and has a 30 day evaluation period. During the evaluation period the program is fully functional. I am still in the evaluation period, but I believe I will probably go with this software, as it seems to work very well and be relatively low cost for the feature set it offers.
Most of the pages listed here update the weather data about once every 60 seconds. The data at the weather station is updated every 2.5 seconds, but the data display on this server is only updated every 60 seconds. A faster update rate could be arranged, but the site would not be very dail-up friendly.
The "Live Action" link at the bottom of this page is a plug-in for Weather Display that presents the data in a flash movie format. The data on this link is updated every 5 seconds. This plug in is an additional $20 USD over the basic price of the Weather Display software.
Originally we used a La Crosse WR-2310, but after two years of use we replaced the 2310 with the Davis Vantage Pro2 on February 12, 2006.
If you browse the data on these pages you may note some fairly large glitches in the data around February 12, 2006. This was the date we switched from the WR-2310 to the Vantage Pro2. During this switchover both systems were on and off for lengths of time, and thus the data drops.
Weather Links for our station, located about 5 miles west of the city of Ridgecrest, California, USA.
E-mail me at: mailto:Ridgecrest_Weather@Hotmail.com Major updates and revisions history. Page started 10/19/2004, multiple and frequent changes until 11/01/2004. Updated 11/21/2004 1200, added wind specific page. Updated 12/02/2005, changed RADAR page and moved sat imagery to its own page, also added a Lightning Page and removed daily graphs from 10/22/2004 to 09/30/2005. Updated 02/12/2006, changed to the Davis Vantage Pro 2, relegated the La Crosse WR-2310 to backup duty. Updated 10/22/2006, removed daily graphs from before 04/01/2006 to save server space, removed graphs can be found at http://www.pbase.com/token/weather_stuff Updated 01/14/2007, added the Wunderground banner and link.
Our Weather Station Dials (auto update every 60 seconds).
Our Weather Station Large Display (auto update every 60 seconds).
Our Weather Station Full info (auto update every 60 seconds).
Live action from our Weather Station (requires flash, updates about every 10 seconds).
Selected Wind data for this location.
Consolidated report, including Weekly and Monthly Weather.
Lots of combined data from the weather station, including all reports and graphs.
Some RADAR weather stuff, just for PPS.
Various satellite imagery.
Lightning images, maps, and detectors.