For as long as I can remember I have had a keen interest in
the weather, and, since studying it at university and working for the Met
Office for over a decade, meteorology has been huge part of my life. One facet
of meteorology I am particularly interested in is statistics: how much rain did
we have last month? How many frosts did we have this winter? When did we last
have a temperature that high? – the questions are endless. And so when I was
gifted a weather station by my wife around 5 years ago now, I saw it as a great
opportunity to begin keeping my own records.
My set-up at home is probably quite complex by most people’s
standards, but with a bit of time and effort (and money) is relatively
straightforward to achieve. I have an Aercus WS3083 which contains a number of
instruments connected to a transmitter via RJ11/RJ12 cables, and the wireless
transmitter sends the data to a console which resides indoors.
One issue I have
is that my relatively sheltered back garden isn’t really suitably exposed in
order to provide gold standard measurements of wind or sunshine, but it is
representative of a back garden on the edge of a moderate sized town. So I have
made some modifications to it by extending the cables in order to optimally
position the various instruments, and the wind/sunshine sensors are currently
mounted on a 10ft cranked pole which will eventually be sited on the gable end
of my house, at a standard and well exposed 10 metres. I just haven’t found a
way of getting it up there yet!
The console indoors is connected to a mini PC, which is
always on and permanently connected to the internet. This runs a fantastic
piece of software called Cumulus, which interrogates and logs the data from the
console at 1-minute intervals. Whilst it does take a little bit of setting up,
Cumulus is extremely powerful, and amongst many other things it can upload data
to WOW provided you have registered your site and have a WOW account. As a
meteorologist by trade, I know the real value that observations and ground
truth can have (when viewed with appropriate caution of course!), and the dense
network of observations provided by WOW can be really handy when looking at the
weather at a local level. So I am happy to think that my observation is
contributing to that enhanced data coverage which can be used by local weather
enthusiasts and meteorologists alike.
Note from the WOW team: We are always interested to add to the list of useful third party software on our support pages. Share your experiences in the comments below to help other users link up with WOW!
