Weather Station Changes

I've recently made a change to my Davis Instruments weather station hardware that should improve its online performance. Specifically, I've change the Internet communications link from one that goes from the weather station through my Windows-based weather-station server (an old HP personal computer using third-party software) to Wunderground, to one that goes from my weather station directly to the more robust Davis Instruments weather-station server over the Internet and then on to Wundergound. Accordingly, as long as we have electrical power or the UPS powering my Ethernet switch and DSL router has battery power remaining, and the optical fiber telephone line is working, Air Bellows weather should get through to Wunderground, without need for any intervention whatsoever by Microsoft software or HP personal computer hardware. (The Webcam, however, still depends on both.)

Additionally, Air Bellows weather can now also be monitored at weatherlink.com/user/airbellows.

For those interested in such things, here's how the Air Bellows weather report gets to you:

The sensors for outdoor temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and rainfall are located in a solar-powered Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 weather station. Using radio telemetry, the station periodically sends the raw measurements data to the Vantage Pro2 console here in the house where the barometric pressure is also measured.

The console reduces the raw data to meaningful numbers for temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, relative humidity, rainfall and rainfall rate; stores the data; and presents the data graphically and numerically on its display panel.

An Internet communications module attached to the console provides an Ethernet link to my LAN (local area network). The module also stores the reduced data for a longer period of time and on a periodic basis (once a minute) transmits the data over the Internet via a TCP-IP communications link directly to a data storage facility maintained by Davis Instruments. If the communications link is not available for a scheduled upload, the communications module simply waits until it is and then uploads any data missed in prior communications attempts. The data is saved in the Davis Instruments database for a period of two years. Where and how they do not say!

At the Davis Instruments Web server, the data is broadcast in a Web page at www.weatherlink.com/user/airbellows. The data is also forwarded to the Wunderground network of weather stations where it is subsequently stored, reduced and displayed as Web pages in a variety of formats at http://www.wunderground.com for the fair "city" of Whitehead, NC.

Finally, an image produced at Wunderground giving limited data is displayed on my Weather/Webcam page at http://www.sunsetridge.com/weather/index.html.