I like that Kirill Dubovikov built a weather station and showed others how. The more people who do this, the better, not just for education and skills, but in terms of gathering weather information that can help forecasters. He wrote, "the Weather app on my iPhone is not very good at making accurate forecasts," and I thought, "he must have been using the wrong app." I hope in addition to building weather stations and inspiring others to do so, he'll also give the AccuWeather app a try. [I work at AccuWeather; I admire the work my colleagues do to make and deliver accurate forecasts.] Even if Kirill prefers his weather station, I hope he'll use good apps to cross-check his station. Kirill can help in other ways. I speak Russian, so I volunteered to help beta-test the upcoming new app in Russian. My whole iPhone is in Russian at the moment. But Kirill is a native speaker.
Build yourself a weather station
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#32I get that people like to play with hardware but for practical purposes, there are public APIs with airport weather station data that anyone can use, published at 5 minute intervals (typically).
Considering the data they output must conform to aircraft avionics parsers that are sometimes decades old, they are unlikely to ever change or go away. Since the weather observations are required for IFR flight, the FAA is quick to repair them when they break, too.
Whatever you can build with hobbyist hardware it won't compare to the airport's equipment.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#33I get that people like to play with hardware but for practical purposes, there are public APIs with airport weather station data that anyone can use, published at 5 minute intervals (typically). Considering the data they output must conform to aircraft avionics parsers that are sometimes decades old, they are unlikely to ever change or go away. Since the weather observations are required for IFR flight, the FAA is qu…
That's what I was thinking. You need the data from elsewhere to know what's headed your way.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#34I like that Kirill Dubovikov built a weather station and showed others how. The more people who do this, the better, not just for education and skills, but in terms of gathering weather information that can help forecasters. He wrote, "the Weather app on my iPhone is not very good at making accurate forecasts," and I thought, "he must have been using the wrong app." I hope in addition to building weather stations and…
I had been very disappointed with the local weather forecast last summer, and then there was an interview with one of the meteorologists involved and they said they were quite proud of how accurate their predictions had been so far. I was taken aback, as in my mind their "success rate" had been well below 50%.
Then I got my answer: they focused on the temperature forecast, while since I bike to work what I was interested in was "is it gonna rain today?"
I get that it's difficult to predict when and where rain might occur, but I'd much prefer a rough probability scale to nothing. On the bright side, they have a real-time, radar-based 90 minute rain forecast now, so at least if I check it in the afternoon I can jump on my bike and get home before I get wet.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#35I get that people like to play with hardware but for practical purposes, there are public APIs with airport weather station data that anyone can use, published at 5 minute intervals (typically). Considering the data they output must conform to aircraft avionics parsers that are sometimes decades old, they are unlikely to ever change or go away. Since the weather observations are required for IFR flight, the FAA is qu…
That's what I was thinking. You need the data from elsewhere to know what's headed your way.
The only exception to that rule I would say is it might be useful to have your own lightning strike sensor if your nearest airport doesn't have one. Lightning strike data is highly local and time sensitive. You can learn a lot about which clouds a small airplane should fly through 'right now' and which ones you should not, just looking at lightning strikes.
Otherwise, your tax dollars are paying for those airport readings, use the data you're footing the bill for already, imo ;).
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#36I get that people like to play with hardware but for practical purposes, there are public APIs with airport weather station data that anyone can use, published at 5 minute intervals (typically). Considering the data they output must conform to aircraft avionics parsers that are sometimes decades old, they are unlikely to ever change or go away. Since the weather observations are required for IFR flight, the FAA is qu…
Lots of reasons why you might want more local though. My local airport is more than 10km away (but there are other monitoring stations). Pilots and controllers assume some uncertainty because even within the airport perimeter there will be temperature and wind variation, but they will be in-calibration which is the main advantage. Controllers often rely on pilots to make reports if conditions differ to what the airport is recording, so it's not always considered the absolute truth.
At home, for example: more accurate irrigation control based on local rainfall, greenhouse control, microclimate variations (which can be significant if you live in a hilly or mountainous region), observatory control for astronomers etc. There are lots of reasons why your local conditions could vary considerably from the airport, but you do need to put some effort into enclosures to avoid biases from solar radiation. You can also add other sensors like buried temperature sensors to monitor the soil, cloud cover, etc.
Microclimate is significant. If you live in a city, you'll likely have urban heating effects. If you live up a hill, you will have significantly different measurements to an airport in a valley. Anyone who's been hiking knows that you absolutely need local observations to assess conditions (eg from a hut). Though this is more for illustration, if you're hiking there are normally special weather services for common routes (Austria has a nice site for this I think).
The Met Office runs an API where you can contribute your own measurements [1]. Sites are rated based on quality of instrumentation - note that the gold standard here could be a calibrated mercury thermometer in a Stephenson screen, nothing special. Calibration is key.
These simple weather stations can also be used indoors as cheap multi room thermometers. You can pair them with air quality, gas and particulate sensors. Also a nice exercise in mesh/multi sensor networking.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#37I'm by no means an expert on this, but I had some issues with the temperature reading of the BME280. It seems to be so sensitive that simply having it on top of a Wemos D1 Mini shield PCB cause the temperatures to differ by more than 2 degrees celsius because the heat of the ESP module seems to radiate up to the BME280 (or transfers through the wires/traces). Just having my finger right above it ticked off the temper…
The author didn't say so, but I'd assume these sensors must be placed in a small oven of some kind, so as to introduce averaging and hysteresis of temperature.
When I brew my beer, I need to look at the environmental temperature. I can't stick the thermometer in the beer because it'll be contaminated. So I put a thermometer in a glass of water which I place next to the beer vat.
I'd expect you'd have to put that BME280 in a small metal oven, or submerge in a volume of oil or water. It'll screw up the barometer probably.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#38I like that Kirill Dubovikov built a weather station and showed others how. The more people who do this, the better, not just for education and skills, but in terms of gathering weather information that can help forecasters. He wrote, "the Weather app on my iPhone is not very good at making accurate forecasts," and I thought, "he must have been using the wrong app." I hope in addition to building weather stations and…
Gave it a quick test and I think you should invest a bit more into UX. Default screen shows me only current weather and that just isn't useful. Compare it to default Weather app. Or was I supposed to configure this screen?
Navigation inside the app doesn't feel intuitive at all. Maybe it's more similar to default experience on android? No idea. Map/Hourly/Daily buttons don't work as tabs. Daily view arrives with scrolling up animation, but when you scroll to close it there is a large ad banner (well, understandable, but awkward) and for some reason weather news (why would anyone want it there or at all?). I've noticed "close" button later, but it was in bottom right corner for some reason.
Plastering "RealFeel(r)" everywhere was horrible idea. It is corny, unnecessary and reads worse than "feels like".
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#39I get that people like to play with hardware but for practical purposes, there are public APIs with airport weather station data that anyone can use, published at 5 minute intervals (typically). Considering the data they output must conform to aircraft avionics parsers that are sometimes decades old, they are unlikely to ever change or go away. Since the weather observations are required for IFR flight, the FAA is qu…
Lots of reasons why you might want more local though. My local airport is more than 10km away (but there are other monitoring stations). Pilots and controllers assume some uncertainty because even within the airport perimeter there will be temperature and wind variation, but they will be in-calibration which is the main advantage. Controllers often rely on pilots to make reports if conditions differ to what the airpo…
Yes, I should have qualified that the airport API thing is much more practical in the US, I suppose, since we spend more on aviation than other countries.
Our government since WW2 has subsidized any city which wants an airport so they can have one.
I just took a look at the Dallas, Texas airspace as an example and there are 14 weather stations within the ring defining the metro area's restricted airspace. It looks like the airspace around London-Heathrow has 3.
Re: Build yourself a weather station
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of reasons why you might want more local though. My local airport is more than 10km away (but there are other monitoring stations). Pilots and controllers assume some uncertainty because even within the airport perimeter there will be temperature and wind variation, but they will be in-calibration which is the main advantage. Controllers often rely on pilots to make reports if conditions differ to what the airpo…
Yes, I should have qualified that the airport API thing is much more practical in the US, I suppose, since we spend more on aviation than other countries. Our government since WW2 has subsidized any city which wants an airport so they can have one. I just took a look at the Dallas, Texas airspace as an example and there are 14 weather stations within the ring defining the metro area's restricted airspace. It looks li…
Here you'd probably want to use local automatic weather stations (AWS), which are a superset that includes major airports. There are lot more of those around London than just Heathrow. I imagine NOAA has a similar setup.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/...
I'm not sure if the CAA and Met Office share stations though. Airports often have more specific instruments like ceilometers to give measurements of cloud layer height, while AWS might have more cliamtologic things like pyranometers for sunlight hours.