Category Archives: Weather Site

Weather Site

Modifications to Wind & Direction Height

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Disabled the wind and speed sensor at 10:48 to completely disconnect the cable and drop the aerial pole, the purpose was to add height giving greater accuracy by placing the sensor above the TV aerial, this will also stop the birds sitting on the TV aerial and pooping on it.

This shows the original setup.

SAM_4338 (Small) (Medium)

The new configuration shows the sensor has been lifted 1.5m by sliding a smaller diameter pipe into the main pole, shimming it to fit before being secured by tapping two M6 galvanized roofing bolts, to reduce the overall windage on the pole I have replaced the existing TV aerial with a smaller footprint.

2014-09-13 05.32.56 (Medium)

Sensor reconnected and working satisfactorily same day at 16:45.

Weather Site

Web Site Modifications

Just a few small modifications to the Chatteris.biz Weather pages:

1) The current spate of lightning has caused a problem of page formatting, originally when a storm cell was detected, the information was displayed inside the header of the page, as the lighting cells grew and the information increased, this caused the web page to overrun and loose formatting, I posted the problem in the wxforum.net forum and Wim sorted the script in moments.

Only when lightning cells are detected, will the page header show the lightning alert against a red background, clicking on this message will show the information, I have also added a clickable shortcut to the lightning map page and also a clickable link to how to set a lightning alert up.

Weather alerts page can be accessed from the menu as always.

2) Tidied up the wxspace pages and the radio ham information by adding additional links and sorting page validation errors.

3) Added information on lightning types.

4) Alert message when the weather station is going offline to protect its sensitive and expensive lightning detection equipment, this equipment failed last year due to a storm and I don’t want a repeat, I think the issue was the imbalance in ground potential, so in future when a large storm is over Chatteris, the broadband and external aerial will be unplugged.

Weather Site

Weather Site Minor Additions

Minor tweaking carried out today:

Added Lightning Analysis tab, this opens another page to show statistics from the Boltek lightning detector.

Expanded to Pollen page to show information from The Weather Channel, I have retained the Chatteris map as this has greater detail on it when you follow the link by clicking the map directly.

Glossary of terms added.

Link from the lightning StormVue NGX and Alerts Page has been set up via the TSentry icon, this link takes you to the Contact Me page – TSentry is the software which send the e-mails when certain conditions are met, have a look at the Alerts Page to see what they are.

Weather Site

Lightning Detectors Working Overtime

Had a good electrical storm that Chatteris Weathers own lightning detectors tracked successfully, the software gives each storm cell a reference number, direction bearing in degrees, distance from Chatteris in miles and it’s status, i.e. weak and steady.

The software will also send subscribers an e-mail when a storm meets certain triggers, a e-mail is also automatically sent when no lightning has been detected for over 30 minutes.

Click on link for further details on the alert scheme – To Alerts Page.

Weather Site

Front Page Season Countdown Error Fixed

Noticed that the Season Countdown timer on the main index page had missed out the Summer and went straight into the countdown to Winter from Autumn, I thought this was a bit harsh as we have to give Summer a go at least, the fault turned out to be where I had changed the Americanism of ‘Fall’ to Autumn, this had upset the script, so made really minor word changes and it seems to be ok again.

Weather Site

Weather PC Backup

The Acronis True Image 2013 backup software in online ‘real time’ mode has caused me some problems since the 28th May when I enabled it, with the Weather Display application hanging  and therefore generating a Clientraw data received error on the web site. I have reverted back to incremental backups every 24 hours, bit of a shame that the backup software won’t work as advertised (plenty of user comments on this when googled), but at least this method works.

Weather Site

Weather PC Enhancements

Weather PC RAM increased from 2Gb to 4Gb due to memory resource issues when running Acronis back-up software in ‘real time online’ mode, this memory increase has resolved the problem and now instead of making Incremental backups once per day, the system is creating a constant mirror of the ‘C’ drive to the second hard drive which has also been made bootable.

Hopefully these resilience measures will not be needed, but if history does repeat itself I’m better prepared than last time.

Weather Site

Weather Station Down For Maintenance

Sorry for the interruption to the weather service, I needed to add a second hard drive and clone it, read too much lately of hard drive failures and decided to replace my existing second drive with a new one, rather than a refurbished one off ebay.

Chatteris weather was offline for 3 hrs 42 min, but I did make some changes as well,  such as the clouds page, added a radio player to the marine page and also repaired a broken link with the alerts rss feed.

Weather Site

Weather Station Update

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Weather station has been behaving until a few days ago when it stopped receiving data from the Davis console, only confirmed this earlier today when Weather Display flat-lined, removing the mini usb from the consoles data logger and refitting it enabled Weather Display to start receiving data, checking the loggers drivers with Silicon Labs, the version I was using was not the latest, this has now been downloaded and seems to be working, I’ve no idea why this has just started so I’m not convinced that I have solved anything, fingers crossed 🙂

Sorry for the breaks in service.