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Build yourself a weather station

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Re: Build yourself a weather station

#61

Post by joshvm »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #9

Nice. I love weather station builds. Here is mine. I added a pm air quality sensor, a infrared rain sensor, some light sensors, a CO2 sensor, an accelerometer, and a loudness sensor. There's a spot for my Geiger counter too but that installation is not done yet. https://partofthething.com/thoughts/weather-and-air-quality-...

This is cool. You might be interested in the synthetic sensor project - I don't think it ever got to commercial release, but the idea was to try and merge information from lots of different cheap sensors together into "virtual sensors". For example accelerometer + loudness sensor + pressure change could be combined into a "someone shut the door" sensor. Then you could make heirarchies of these virtual signals, e.g. "kettle on virtual sensor" + "morning" + "some IR signature" = "Alice is making breakfast" (rather than Bob). It's quite a neat idea, but as far as I know they never released any code for it.

http://www.gierad.com/projects/supersensor/

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#62

Post by danielbarla »

magicalhippo wrote: post #34
GeoffKnauth wrote: post #31

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…

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 intere…

I think part of the problem is not the accuracy of the forecast, but whether it's useful to you, or not.

As an example, they may forecast that 30% of the areas your city will report rain tomorrow. They may have an high level of confidence in this prediction (and verify it to be correct after the fact). It may still not be very useful to you, since the one outcome is so different to the other.

That said, I agree with your that the predictions should be presented in a more scientific manner. In fact, one irritating pattern is that rain probability and the predicted amount of rain sometimes get combined into a single percentage, which no longer represents neither the probability, nor the amount. It's some kind of weird combination of the two.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#64

Post by jrockway »

Jaruzel wrote: post #17

For those that do not feel brave enough to build a weather station from scratch you can buy a 'Watson W-8681' Weather Station and hook up a Raspberry Pi to it to collect all the data. Jim Easterbrook (ex-BBC engineer) has a really good write up on the process, and also shares his python code: http://www.jim-easterbrook.me.uk/weather/ I don't know Jim, but I have done the same following his instructions.

This is more useful. The mechanics of the IoT is one problem that might need to be solved, but sourcing good sensors is more interesting to read about.

I unfortunately do not have a good site for a weather station, so I just use the NYS Mesonet: http://www.nysmesonet.org/

(They charge $450,000 a year for commercial customers but still don't have a TLS certificate. The weather stations are good, though.)

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#65

Post by jrockway »

RNCTX wrote: post #32

I 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…

My understanding is that the FAA sites aren't as useful as they could be for weather forecasting. Apparently many sites are too close to the ground, so the temperature data and dewpoint data is unusable for mesoscale analysis. Sometimes the dewpoint is above the air temperature, for example, which is impossible. It doesn't really matter for air traffic, but it does matter for forecasting storms.

If you are interested in the wind direction or the height of the cloud bases, the aviation weather stations are OK. If you are interested in temperature data, you will have to look elsewhere. (Many states have observation sites designed for weather purposes. The Oklahoma Mesonet was the first, but other states have them too. Often these sites have very interesting information, like soil moisture and temperature, and temperatures at varying heights above the ground: http://www.nysmesonet.org/about/sensors http://www.mesonet.org/index.php/site/about/instruments)

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#66

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

ssfivy wrote: post #13
fuzzy2 wrote: post #6

A word of advice: double-check you're actually getting a BME280. I accidentally bought a BMP280 which lacks the humidity sensor. -_- So yeah, I have something similar myself, with a React frontend on the official Raspberry Pi display, a BME680 (never got the IAQ stuff to work though) and InfluxDB + Grafana. No remote/outdoor modules yes, because I'm undecided about the technology.

Also, doublecheck the readings from this sensor. There has been plenty of report about the temperature reading being much higher than the actual temperature (in my case, I got 4C higher than ambient). Some people says it has self-heating problem since if you put active airflow the temperature dropped.

I live in Michigan so I would leave it be- a few extra degrees of warmth would maybe act as a placebo effect

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#67

Post by 1234letshaveatw »

mikece wrote: post #56

Very neat -- but I would love to see one of these that doesn't rely on WiFi or Bluetooth, using instead something like a Baofeng UV-5R and sending weather info updates by APRS (amateur radio license required), allowing for really remote observation stations.

or LoRa? It wouldn't require a license

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#68

Post by JshWright »

roter wrote: post #57
GeoffKnauth wrote: post #31

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…

One issue with hobbyist weather stations is that they aren't particularly useful for use for assimilating into numerical weather models. The pressure is useful as it is relatively hard to get that wrong unless mislabelling sea-level pressure as station pressure. Other variables can be significantly in error due to the siting of the station: under a tree, not aspirated, in the wake of a building, on a rooftop, etc.

> Other variables can be significantly in error due to the siting of the station: under a tree, not aspirated, in the wake of a building, on a rooftop, etc.

I would think there is still value there, at a sufficient scale.

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#69

Post by mikece »

1234letshaveatw wrote: post #67
mikece wrote: post #56

Very neat -- but I would love to see one of these that doesn't rely on WiFi or Bluetooth, using instead something like a Baofeng UV-5R and sending weather info updates by APRS (amateur radio license required), allowing for really remote observation stations.

or LoRa? It wouldn't require a license

The advantage of APRS is that there is a HUGE network of digital repeaters (digipeaters) across the US (and probably world-wide though the US is my main interest). APRS also has several internet cross-over listening points so you could hook into a service like https://aprs.fi to listen for updates hitting the network from your weather stations.

The licensing requirement isn't steep in the US; if memory serves its 35 questions, all multiple choice, and the question pool is published. Readers of Hacker News should be able to pass the technician exam with about a week of light study and that gives you full privileges from 30 MHz and up (APRS runs between 144 and 146 MHz depending on which country you're in).

Re: Build yourself a weather station

#70

Post by move-on-by »

roter wrote: post #57
GeoffKnauth wrote: post #31

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…

One issue with hobbyist weather stations is that they aren't particularly useful for use for assimilating into numerical weather models. The pressure is useful as it is relatively hard to get that wrong unless mislabelling sea-level pressure as station pressure. Other variables can be significantly in error due to the siting of the station: under a tree, not aspirated, in the wake of a building, on a rooftop, etc.

I think wind it particularly hard to get right. However, any station contributing to the CWOP can be looked up on 'weather.gladstonefamily.net' for really nice quality control stats against other local stations. For reference, here is one I randomly picked in the Nashville area that is passing quality control for pressure and temperature, but failing the wind QC:

https://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/AP187

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