Information

Why have a weather site?

I first became interested in the weather as a teenager when I was given a Max/Min thermometer. Rather than go to University I elected to leave school at 17 and joined the Meteorological Office as a weather observer. National Service soon came along and I was lucky enough to be able to do the same job, once the square bashing part was out of the way! Most of the time I spent at RAF Nicosia in Cyprus. On return to civilian life I took quite some time to get the necessary qualifications to be accepted as a forecaster. During that time I was on various RAF stations then civil aviation airfields. My last 20 years or so were spent forecasting in a whole variety of locations, in the United Kingdom and abroad. Aviation, both RAF and Civil, Weather centres, the Oil industry, finishing up in the Falklands as part of a team of senior forecasters at Mount Pleasant. Prior to that as the Senior Meteorological Officer at RAF Finningley which is now the new civil airport of Doncaster.

On retiring I decided, after a little while, to start taking readings of temperature and keeping a weather diary. There is so much information on the Internet that I was very loathe to do any more but fairly recently I started to think about having an automatic weather station. This obviously required a web site as well if I was to share the information. I have also recently joined COL(Climat Observers Link) and that further encouraged me to share information. Creating a web site was not an easy task to me, not being very technically minded, so I found a local company to do it for me.

Well that is enough about me, so on to my site. On it you will find my own automatic weather station, in a very sheltered site, in my back garden, the photograph shows the Davis Vantage set up I have. The data is uploaded into my computer by the Davis software, and is updated every 10 minutes.You can access this current weather, by the link buttons at the top of the screen. Most weather parameters are shown down the left hand side with the valid time at the top. Graphical representations of most of these elements are shown on the right for the past 24 hours. Go to Statistics and click on weekly graphs and the past week is shown for the main elements. The history graphs are not yet the same elements as the weekly graphs. On the left I have not yet managed to get a date stamp for the maximum and minimum values for months and year. There is data supplied by the Davis system, in the form of graphs, in the STATISTICS back to when I started with it in October 2004. Another section in there is slowly being updated with my own weather diary, from now, eventually back to January 1997. Even further back, and goodness knows when it will be completed, will be data from RAF Finningley. This site has data from about 1943 up to its closure in September 1995. Its a very big task so its going to take me a long time but please browse through what I have available.

Two points about the Davis data.

1). Temperatures, there will always be a difference of +0.5C between the Davis monthly max and my own weather diary. Reason? Over the years I have calibrated various thermometers for my garden, from Met Office calibrations at RAF Finningley and the Davis is about 0.5C too low on the maximum, other data is accepted as correct.

2). The anemometer was only adjusted to a reasonable height early this year, so wind speeds before then are too light. They are still light when compared to an open site such as Doncaster Airport.

3) the rainguage is very sheltered and I suggest adding about 20% to my daily and monthly totals for a more realistic value for Doncaster.

On the weather sites link there are a number of sites that will open up. All are first class in my opinion, some give actual weather, radar pictures, satellite views, some give simple forecasts, others are for the more knowledgeable with links into centres that produce ‘model’ output forecasts.

Also, as I get time, the Hobbies page will contain links to areas of interest to me: skiing, walking, gardening, family history and one or two others.

Thank you for visiting my weather site, I hope you have enjoyed it. Please e mail any comments you may have to me at the Contact Me button at the bottom of this page.

Updates and changes below:

from 1 June 2006

Most of the time the actual weather is fine, just once in a while it misses some data.

on 21 July 2005:- The data is now only uploaded every 30 minutes as it seems to take a huge amount of computing power which, at times, causes problems. I have tried to get it sorted with Davis - sadly they seem unwilling to make any real effort to help with the problem.

4 June 2005. The site now seems to be free from the various malicious actions that plagued my site for 10-15 days. Hopefully the individual who caused it will be unable to repeat it.

added 8/5/05 I have added another upper air item from Net Weather. This gives forecast skew-T diagrams for various places in the British Isles. For anyone not familar with this forecast tool I have a tutorial on the same page.

This loss of data problem is usually caused by mains pulses or low frequency interference but my guess would be mains pulses.

We have had this problem reported to us before by other users and it has always been mains pulses which glitch the console processor and cause loss of data.

It is likely to happen again but it may happen next week or next year it really depends on your electricity generating board.

This explanation is from Blue Wave whom I bought the Davis from.