New Weather Station Installed

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After a year of it being offline, my work (Earth Networks) sent me a replacement weather station, so it is finally back online. Here’s the link to my Earth Networks Online Weather Center page for the weather station showing the data and my HD weather cam. The station and camera are also accessible on WeatherBug (Earth Networks used to own WeatherBug, but we sold WeatherBug to GroundTruth yet we still power their weather data). It is also accessible on The GLOBE Program for schools who need to visualize the station or use the data for data mining purposes.

The weather station itself is a Davis Vantage Pro 2 connected to a network appliance called an Earth Networks Hub (a Linux board with the connectors for the weather station and Ethernet to transmit the data to the Earth Networks weather network). My weather camera is a Sony HD camera that connects over Ethernet (Earth Networks now uses Axis PTZ cameras, but I’ve had mine for a while).

Just a little fun to show some of the work I do when I’m not posting tech articles on AskWoody.

Nathan Parker

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Elly, Barry, Kirsty

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Well done, Nathan, from an ex Met Man!

I have my own weather station but it’s a Fine Offset so needs some work to make the temperatures in the sun correct. I would have liked a better AWS like yours, but finance (and its size) precluded that!

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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I have a lot of fun working for a weather company. We have built our own hardware in the past, but we’re trying to sell more Davis stations now so we can work more on delivering services versus manufacturing hardware (since Davis stations are solid). My company gave me  this one, so I didn’t have to shell out the big bucks for it. The new hub (white box) is a new thing we’re using to send data to us (in the past we had a green box, blue box, and red box, and before that, we connected the machines directly to PC’s running software). The installation went smoothly, and the hub does all the heavy lifting to get the data on our network without needing a full-fledged PC. I enjoy looking at my HD Cam as well especially during storms.

Nathan Parker

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Elly

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Every morning and also before calling it a day, I look online at the weather report for my location, centered at the “Wunderground” weather station nearest to where I live, both for that day and the next ten days. And also to look at the animated weather radar displays covering the local, regional, and whole USA, in that order, for the most recent period of time this information has been available. Information collected at weather stations throughout the land, many of them run by individuals and small organizations using their own instruments and computers as  your own. Plus a global weather picture from information obtained from foreign weather bureaus and weather satellites.

I’m especially thankful to all of the individual station-keepers for helping me to keep dry, not being wind blown, skidding on ice on roads of heavy traffic, or slipping and falling on sidewalks, or becoming a snowdrift prisoner in a blizzard. And being ready, with fresh batteries in my flashlights and cell phone, with water saved in containers and sufficient canned food, for the latest big storm on the move that looks like it is aimed at where I live. Or keeping an eye on the weather situation where relatives and friends live. And for allowing me to plan my day and, for some days into the future, find the best times for planning and arranging in advance to do anything that requires leaving home for significant periods of time and, or making long road trips to wherever I might have, eventually, to go.

 

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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When I had a personal weather station, I used to send data to Wunderground (now that I have a company-owned weather station, it’s doubtful it’ll be sending data to our competitor). 🙂

My job at Earth Networks used to be overseeing Personal Weather Stations for WeatherBug/Earth Networks (basically our version of Wunderground). When we sold the WeatherBug brand, we tried to get a new PWS system online, but we ran into technical issues with it, so we sunset the old system and instead, we’re pivoting to ingesting in data from NWS CWOP/NOAA MADIS for PWS. NWS CWOP/NOAA MADIS quality checks the data from these stations before they even go into the feed, so we can ensure we’ll get quality data from PWS operators in this feed.

However, our main advantage over Wunderground is that we also have a global network of commercial-grade weather stations professionally-installed my field meteorologists and quality-controlled on our end. It ensures the data customers receive is commercial-grade and solid, not only simply hobbyist data. We also operate a global lightning network that can detect total lightning, as well as simulate radar based on lightning intensity.

For enterprises, Earth Networks sales the weather hardware and enterprise weather services. For consumers, I recommend WeatherBug.com or the WeatherBug apps (we used to own WeatherBug. We sold it to GroundTruth, but we still power their data). Weather Watcher Live for Windows also uses Earth Networks data in the program (it’s one Windows tool I’ve missed being on a Mac). Earth Networks lightning is also in the Baron Critical Weather, RadarScope, and WDT Weather Radio apps (it’s also in AllisonHouse packages). For radar, I recommend the Baron Critical Weather app or the Live Weather page on BaronWeather.com (Baron has the best radar data in the industry and even did the NEXRAD Dual-Pol upgrade. I actually pay Baron a nice little fee per month for their Public Safety Baron Threat Net package since it’s rock-solid for severe weather tracking).

Earth Networks also feeds some school data into The GLOBE Program which is a good resource for students needing station data for school science projects.

Nathan Parker

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