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Mill Bay BC Canada Latitude: 48° 38' 21" N |
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Weather Station Project | ||||
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Current Weather
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The Davis Wireless Vantage Pro Weather station appears to be a well manufactured, capable, and very accurate piece of instrumentation (specs).
I am most interested in the agronomic effects of weather on vegetation, so I installed the weather station's ISS on a 9' x 4" x 4" post sunk into the ground so that the anemometer height is 6 feet above the ground surface. I have been very happy with the station itself but I had to manually record the daily information and then type it into my computer for plotting and analysis. After doing this daily for nearly 3 months I broke down and purchased the Davis WeatherLink serial interface option near the end of March 2004. The idea being that I would then be able to automatically collect, analyze and publish the weather data onto the internet using my in-house web/home automation server - a Macintosh G3/300 MiniTower. I was extremely disappointed with the Davis WeatherLink software for OS X, and in particular the lack of options for the Internet delivery of the data so, about two weeks later, I started programming my own software. I began by writing a Macintosh serial driver to communicate with the weather station. My software initially created a very simple web page that only provided current conditions for temperature, humidity, pressure, wind and rainfall. Over the subsequent 3 weeks the software has evolved into the present system providing current and detailed weather reports, forecasts, java and XML banners, and the little XML weather "stamp" file that can be inserted into any remote web page. Mill Bay weather is checked, and the weather files are updated, every 5 minutes 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
In mid-August, 2004 I added a web cam to the Mill Bay, BC Weather Station Project. Besides resolving hardware issues, I wrote routines to capture and archive the cam images that are taken every 5 mintes, and to generate a time-lapse movie of all of the individual frames for the previous day. Details on the Mill Bay BC Weather Cam hardware, software, and programming can be found here on their own web page. The current cam image (with links to earlier images, and to the time-lapse movies for the previous seven days) are located here. In early September, 2004 I added real-time charting for some of the main weather variables from the weather station (temperature, wind, rain, relative humidity and barometric pressure). Instead of writing my own plotting program I corresponded with Robert Ladle and then began using his great free-ware charting application PawsPlot. I wrote routines to read the weather data and to create and update the plot files needed by PawsPlot to generate real-time charts. Weather data is updated every 5 minutes (each time the Vantage Pro weather station is read) and from this data the current charts for Mill Bay BC are updated every 15 minutes. To supplement the real-time plotting of each day's data, I wrote routines to archive, search and retrieve historical charts. Today's charts, and options for finding and displaying historical charts of Mill Bay's weather can be viewed here on the Mill Bay BC Weather Station Charts page. As this software evolves further, and depending on my free time, my plan is to add the following capabilities:
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I became interested in weather and weather monitoring while working as a research associate in the physical sciences at the University of Alberta in the late 1970's and early 1980's (more about me 
The millbay.socialize.ca Weather Station is located 
Find the "as the crow flies" distance between any two location on the planet. An extensive database contains many locations from around the world, or enter in the longitude and latitude for any two locations yourself. Compute: Great Circle Distance & Initial True Angle, Loxodrome & True Angle, times of sunrise & sunset, hours of daylight, solar energy, and current local time for both locations.
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