Weatherstation

Data for the last 90 days

Climate data for the last years

Highs and lows since December 1, 2014

Rainfall per year

Rainfall per month in the current year

Weather station karpa-cuxhaven (INIEDERS390)

In 2014, I started using an Oregon Scientific WMR200 station. The station offered temperature, wind, pressure, humidity and a precipitation sensor. The main unit of the station is powered by a small solar panel, but batteries are required for operation during the night. Unfortunately, the solar panel is not designed to charge batteries. However, the batteries stayed good from day one until January 13, 2018 (so I never had to replace them). The rain gauge is separate from the other sensors and is also battery powered, but has no support for a solar panel. This sensor was the weakest part in my setup. It failed in January 2015 and it took me 4 weeks to get a replacement. After I installed the replacement unit, the rain gauge failed again in October 2017. Replacing the batteries and cleaning the gauge did not help. I was unable to revive it. In 2016, I also added a UV sensor to the station.

So I decided to buy another station, as the prices for them were not much more expensive than buying a new rain sensor. Since I didn’t want to afford a Davis, I decided to go with a Fine Offset WH2601. The sensor unit of the Fine Offset is similar in appearance to the Davis and has only one unit that contains all the sensors. Like the Oregon, the unit is supported by a solar panel, but also does not allow batteries.

While the Oregon operated at about 4 meters above the ground, this time I wanted to go higher to avoid any interference from the house when measuring wind speed. I bought a telescopic mast that would allow me to go up to about 8 meters, but it then becomes too wobbly, so I decided to stay at about 6 meters. That is already a good step forward.

The Oregon station was USB-based, while the Fine Offset hooks into the network and sends weather data immediately to the Weather Underground service.

To get the data from the Orgeon published to Weather Underground and my own weather site, I set up an older iMac with WeatherCat software. This worked smoothly from 2014 to January 2018. Since the application does not support the Fine Offset Station and I wanted to replace the iMac with a Raspberry PI, I made all the changes together in January.

There is a software package, WeeWx, that also supports the Fine Offset Station, but for me it was very complex and not intuitive. At first, I decided to stick with Weather Underground with just the data.

While I was looking around for configuration, I found a gem called Weather Station for WordPress. I tried it out and this package is really a fantastic product. It integrates weather data from Weather Underground directly into your own blog. In addition, it is also possible to work with data provided directly through Clientraw, Realtime or other formats. I asked my son if he could write a small program to pull the data from the station and prepare it for the realtime.txt format. Since January 24, I now have it in use with both data interfaces: weather underground and realtime.txt file to wordpress plugin. It works smoothly.

Weather station setup

Weather station setup

• The station sends the data directly to the Weather Underground server after it has been configured.
• Every minute, a Java program on the Raspberry retrieves the weather data from the station’s own site
• As soon as the data is processed, the application sends it to the web host server in realtime.txt format.
• The WordPress plugin picks up the data and stores it in the WordPress database
• The plugin saves the previous values in the tag table of the WordPress database
• Once per day the plugin deletes the daily data and stores them in aggregated format (min, max, mean, standard deviation)
• Since I switched the plugin to fast execution, I also turned off the WP-CRON process and start it every minute via script
• Every 15 minutes the image from the IP camera is tapped and also sent to the server (offline since 2019)

 
Change since 2019: Since Weather Underground was taken over by IBM and this company wanted to have money per subscription to use my data for their service, I don’t share the data with WU anymore. Alternatively I use PWS Weather since then.