Ken's Linux based Weather Station

The weather data on the Experimental Weather Page comes from a
weather station Ursula and I have installed at our residence in Crestline, about 1 mile from the launch site, not far from the Windtalker location (909-338-3362).  Since this is the time of year when the weather/wind information is needed most, I have decided to put up at least the minimal form of  information that the page now presents, so that the information can be used.
   
I have plans to have graphs, averages over various periods, and other ways of displaying the data in the near future. The page may be absent or non-functional at any time due to fiddling with it. If you know of any particularly useful and novel ways to display weather/wind data, please email me with a description and/or link.

The anemometer and wind vane are mounted on a pole sticking out the top of a tree in our front yard, at an approximate altitude of 5000' MSL.

The weather station is an Ultimeter 2000 by Peet Bros. with a sensor
package from American Weather Enterprises. The equipment is good, and the package was shipped within moments of our placing the order, but the support since then has been lacking. I have emailed them several
times with a question about accurately setting the barometer in the mountains and about an algorithm for averaging wind direction readings. They have not responded, not even to tell me that they don't know. I guess that once they get payment for the goods they couldn't care less about the customer. If others are considering getting weather equipment I suggest checking out the market leader Davis Instruments (market leaders usually have that status for a reason) or Texas Weather Instruments instead of the companies I used.

The station is connected to an old 486 PC w/8 Meg of ram running Red
Hat Linux 6.0, which employs a simple perl script to store the station output and translate it into an html table. A cron job invokes ftp every 10 minutes, which uploads the page header, then appends the formatted data and a page footer. A good use for an old machine like that.

Good Flying,

Ken Howells
khowells@concentric.net

Crestline Weather Conditions:
http://www.crestlinesoaring.org/wx/index.html

Wills Wing, Inc.
http://www.willswing.com
ken@willswing.com