The Official AWC Weather Station

Instruments

In August 2005 I installed a Davis Vantage Pro2™ weather station at our home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In December 2005, I added the WeatherLink^® datalogger and computer software. Thus, the AWC Weather Station was born and online!

The outdoor sensor suite (ISS)

The outdoor sensors consist of the basic ISS (Integrated Sensor Suite) with a tipping bucket rain guage and sheltered temperature and humidity sensors, and an anemometer and directional vane. The indoor console has temperature and humidity sensors and a barometer.

Location

I attached the ISS to a 4"x4" post, located about 2' north of the northwestern corner of our deck. The instruments are about 6' above ground level (4½' above deck level), with grass and mulch directly underneath. I debated about the placement of the anemometer/vane, but decided to install it on the same post with the ISS. My two primary reasons for this decision: 1) I don’t have a ladder that reaches to my roof, and 2) I really wanted to know what the wind was where I live, not 25-30' off the ground. So, my wind speeds will be somewhat less than what would be officially recorded here, and the wind direction is skewed by local obstacles (houses and trees). Someday, I may get a ladder or have access to one and decide to re-locate the anemometer; or I may not.

Google Earth View — the red dot shows ISS location

From the above view, you can see that the house blocks the ISS to the south and southeast, there are trees a little further to the west and west northwest, and another house a little further to the northeast. Except for swirling, the location should favor southwest, north northeast, and easterly winds.

The location of the ISS, according to Google Earth, is 41.1338N, 85.0307W at an elevation of 784' (239m).

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Availability of Data

Data provided on awcfamily.com:

Current Conditions, data on this page is updated every five minutes (except when my computer or my internet connection is down)
Current Monthly Climatological Summary, data on this page is updated shortly after midnight daily
Current Annual Climatological Summary, data on this page is updated shortly after midnight daily
Data Archive, data on this page is updated monthly (usually during the first week of the month)

In addition to this website, data from my weather station is uploaded for personal and research use to two other websites.

Citizen Weather Observer Program

The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is a private-public partnership with three main goals: 1) to collect weather data contributed by citizens; 2) to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and 3) to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality. The CWOP collects data from over 4500 nongovernmental weather stations and transmits it to the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) that NOAA provides for the purpose of improving weather forecasting, by providing support for data assimilation, numerical weather prediction, and other hydrometeorological applications.

My CWOP call sign is CW4824; current and historical data can be viewed at

www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=CW4824

findU is a database archiving weather, position, telemetry, and message data. The primary source of data is an amateur radio system called APRS, some weather data comes from an internet based system called the Citizen Weather Observer Program. This large (>50 GB) database is constantly updated (about 20 new reports come in every second), and is accessed via a number of dynamic web pages.

An analysis of the accuracy and reliability of my weather station (based on other MADIS data in the area) is provided at weather.gladstonefamily.net.

Weather Underground

My data is also part of the Personal Weather Station network (currently including over 12000 personal stations worldwide) maintained by the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground provides succinct, but extensive, reliable and accurate weather information — data, imagery, forecasts, and weather advisories (watches and warnings) — for over 60,000 U.S. and international cities. They also provide extensive information on tropical weather (hurricanes, typhoons, etc.) around the world. You can access most information for free; though you do get advertisements with your weather. Fortunately, they do not use popups (perhaps the most annoying method of advertising on the web, though flash animations that suddenly produce sound when your cursor passes over them are a close second).

For a very modest fee ($10/year as I write this), you can get advertising-free access, longer radar animations, "universal" favorite cities (you just save your favorite cities once and can access them easily from any computer you go to), and weather forecasts and warnings via email. It is one of the few websites that I am willing to pay for.

My Weather Underground station ID is KINFORTW9; current and historical data can be viewed at

www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KINFORTW9

Data Recording and Analysis Software

As mentioned earlier, I currently use the data recording, analysis, and uploading software that came with the Davis WeatherLink^® datalogger.

The WeatherLink software has a tendency to hang or crash every so often. I have the serial port version of the datalogger at home and the USB version at work. The serial port version worked much more reliably than the USB version; but I still wanted something that would automatically restart the WeatherLink software when it crashed. One of the most promising ones I found online is StartWatch, a shareware program that lets you coordinate the startup of your applications and monitor them after they're started.

At that same website (SoftWx.com), I noticed a program called VirtualVP, a shareware program that lets you connect up to 4 weather programs to a single Davis Vantage Pro 1 or 2 weather station (console or Envoy).

It turns out that using VirtualVP seems to alleviate the extra problems with the USB version of the datalogger. Couple that with StartWatch, and my weather uploading from work has gone flawlessly for months.

It has also improved the uptime from home; however, it seems my router, cable modem, and/or Comcast (my ISP) are not quite as reliable and occasionally put WeatherLink into such a funk that not even StartWatch can get it to terminate cleanly so that StartWatch can restart it. Still, StartWatch and VirtualVP have provided great value for the low registration fee.

Also from SoftWx.com is a freeware program called VPLive that connects to a Davis Vantage Pro 1 or 2 Weather Station console (either directly or through VirtualVP) and displays the live data. It also calculates the station pressure (i.e. actual pressure), altimeter pressure, and running averages needed to properly generate and send APRS/CWOP data. So, I have been using that (instead of WeatherLink) to upload my APRS/CWOP data. If only VPLive could also upload to WeatherUnderground (I have submitted a request for that to the author of VPLive, so it is on his to-do list).

I am in the preliminary stages of researching other software packages, either to augment WeatherLink (i.e. connect through VirtualVP along with WeatherLink) or replace it. My notes for that are on the WeatherLink Software Alternatives page.