Weather Station Status

NewtownSquareWeather.com

Weather Station Status

Weather data is recorded live at Newtown Square, Pennsylvania (Newtown Township, Delaware County) which is about 15 miles west of Philadelphia.

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The data on the main page is updated every 10 minutes at 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 minutes past the hour. This 'Status Page' is updated manually, as needed.

Current Weather Station Status Last Updated : Mon Aug 11 23:08:20 EDT 2008
Temperature	Fully Operational
Barometer	Fully Operational
Relative Humidity	Fully Operational
Wind Direction	Fully Operational
Wind Speed	Fully Operational
Rain Gauge	Fully Operational
Tower Web Cam	DOWN
Front Yard Web Cam	Fully Operational

Recent Events ...

Monday August 11, 2008 2300 Replaced batteries in humidity base unit and readings were restored. A few resets just prior to changing them produces some rather strange displays.. indicating that the weak batteries were probably causing all sort of problems with it. Seem to be OK now. Also made minor adjustment to the barometer calibration. It had been running just a tad higher than it should have been. Unfortunately I think it tends to drift around a little bit depending on the battery voltage.
Monday August 11, 2008 0730 Power failure just after midnight for slightly over an hour which was too long for the various UPS-es to handle. Everything came back up OK when power returned except for the rain/interface which caused loss of about 7 1/2 hours of data, and somehow the relative humidity also went out about the same time (it all runs on batteries). Reset the RH receiver in the morning but still out. Will investigate further. It could decide to come back on it's own.
Monday July 7, 2008 FINALLY was able to get up on the tower to replace the wind sensor cable yesterday, so after about 6 months of no wind direction data and degraded wind speed data, things are back to normal. However, upon inspecting the actual wind sensor, I found that the movement of the wind direction vane seems a bit stiff. It moves, but requires a bit more wind than it should take to move it. So looks like under light wind conditions, wind direction readings may not be as accurate as they should be. Looks like after 8 years it may be time for a new wind sensor. Also trimmed a lot of branches from trees near the tower that were partially shielding the rain gauge below them.
Saturday May 17, 2008 21:00 The rain gauge started reporting continuous counts about 4 AM Monday May 12. The problem was electrical and it was disconnected until about 8 PM today. Found that something (?) had cut (or chewed?) through the cable to it and causing a short. The section of cable was replaced. Rainfall on May 12 and May 16 was entered manually to show the approximate amount, however the time may not be accurate.
Sunday January 27, 2008 19:00 Moved the relative humidity sensor. Essentially in the same location.. just a little further away from the window it is near. Suspected that previous location may have been slightly warmer than true outside temperature since it was so close to the window. Before relocation it was reading 2-3 degrees higher temperature than the regular station temperature. Now it is reading less than 1/2 degree higher. Too soon to tell exactly what effect this will have on humidity readings. Humidity readings have been lower than they should be. This is first attempt to figure out why and try to correct it. Also replaced the batteries in the remote unit while I was moving it. Trying a set of Lithium AA batteries. They should work better in cold weather.
As of 23:00 dewpoint was still reading about 10 degrees lower than 4 other nearby stations. Will be keeping a close eye on it.
Sunday January 27, 2008 00:30 Replaced battery in humidity base unit and readings returned. Also started getting LOW BATTERY reports from the temp/bar sensor a few days ago, so replaced it's battery too. Wind is still in a degraded state. No direction readings and speed readings are often higher than they should be. At least getting a relative indication of wind speed. The rain gauge heater has been working very nicely so far.
Sunday December 16, 2007 13:20 Wind direction had been running in a degraded state since about December 7, however it appeared to be working better on it's own around Dec 11-12.. but then speed readings dropped out for 2 days. On Dec 14 it appeared that both returned, however, the speed readings were good, direction was not. About 6 AM Sunday Dec 16, speed started reading incorrectly, and it appeared that the signal from the speed sensor signal was somehow getting mixed in with the direction signal. There is most likely water in the cable or in a connection somewhere causing crosstalk between the signals. The result is totally useless speed and direction data. The bad speed data that began around 6 AM has been removed and for now speed and direction data has been turned off. I hope to get a chance to look into the problem outside later this afternoon but there may not be a whole lot that can be done right now.
Sunday December 9, 2007 23:50 Made a temporary fix that should provide some limited wind direction data. Not sure how accurate it will be but at least it should change as the actual direction changes. Can possibly make some refinement to it after I see exactly how it is working. Suspect that one of the conductors inside the cable up to the sensor has failed. If the failure is on the tower it could be a little while before it can be repaired. I need run some additional tests.
Sunday December 9, 2007 On Friday noticed that wind directions seemed to be stuck at "north" but not sure if it was simply due to ice. Now on Sunday, after 48 hours of constant "north" readings indicates there is a problem with the sensor or the interface. Will try to investigate later today.
Sunday July 8, 2007 No relative humidity data for the past week. Finally got a chance to check it. Reset did not restore data. Since it has been a while since batteries were replaced, replaced both indoor base and outdoor sensor batteries. Data is restored.
Saturday June 23, 2007 Noticed a few rain counts during Thursday, Friday, and Saturday yet there was no rain since Wednesday. Found that the rain gauge funnel was clogged and had a small amount of water in it. This must have been seeping through the clog since Wednesday giving an occasional count. Let the water drain and then cleared out all of these extra counts and added them in to Wednesday data where they should have been. Rainfall shown on Wednesday June 20 may not have really been spread out as much as shown, but the actual amount should be pretty accurate.
Thursday June 7, 2007 Late Wednesday evening I got back to looking at the wind/rain interface computer again and decided to start from scratch with (another) close visual inspection of the main processor board. I had already found a broken connection during a brief look about a week earlier. I also re-seated all of the chips. It did the trick. About 1 AM it came back to life. So as of 1:30 AM everything is back to normal. Unfortunately during the outage period we had 2 major rain storms and no data was recorded. I do have some estimates which I will merge in with the data so that at least the monthly and yearly rain totals will be a little better than if I do nothing. In total, just a few hours short of 3 weeks (21 days) of data was lost. Fortunately there was no rain during the first 10 days of this period and only 3 periods of rain during the other 10. This is the first time in the almost 7 years that I have been recording weather data that there was a failure of this length. I have plans for some changes that should reduce the chances of something like this happening again.. but this is basically just a hobby.. so no guarantees. I am not NOAA :)
Tuesday June 5, 2007 Late in the evening I finally got some time to take a closer look at the wind/rain interface computer. I was able to determine that the microprocessor was "trying" to run, that is, generally the signals on the board looked reasonable, but something was not quite right since upon power-on it seemed to just enter a fairly tight loop .. and just hang. After a good 3-4 hours I had to give up for the night .. but it looks hopeful.
Friday June 1, 2007 Late in the evening, actually about 1 AM Friday, I had a chance to open up the relative humidity box to check it out further. Appears that corrosion (?) had caused the power connection to the camera that "reads" the humidity gauge to become intermittent. After considerable "jiggling" and connect/disconnect cycles of the connector, and a few false starts, I was able to achieve a reliable power connection which restored the humidity data.
Monday May 21, 2007 I noticed that the relative humidity data had been out most of the day. The data loss was due to a very poor image quality from the camera that reads the sensor. I cycled power (which often corrects odd problems) and the image would return briefly and then become a garbled. Something is not right but I don't have have time to look into it any further right now. It has to be either the actual camera or the power supply. My guess is the power supply .. or power related.
Thursday May 17, 2007 About 8 AM there was some kind of power glitch were I suspect power failed for a few seconds. The UPS kept the main servers and the weather station data collection computer going but it was discovered later that evening that the wind/rain sensor interface (not on UPS) had not been running since about 8 AM. This interface computer is actually a pre-historic (pre-PC era) homemade 6800 microprocessor that was put back in service in 2000 to be the interface between the wind and rain sensors and that data collection PC. This thing originally dates to back in the late 1970's and has been doing it's job quite well. After a quick investigation and several reset attempts it did not appear to be coming back anytime soon, at least not until I had time to dig into it's four wire-wrapped circuit boards. Unfortunately it was going to have to wait..
Saturday March 17, 2007 About 7 PM Friday evening I added a crude prototype of a heater for the rain gauge. Initial indications through the evening of March 16 during a major sleet/ice storm, it seemed to work nicely. It still needs some fine tuning and to be made more permanent but the basic idea seems to work. There may not be too many more chances to test it this season. Hopefully it will be in it's final form and full operation for next winter.
Wednesday March 15, 2007 Replaced the battery in the temperature/barometer sensor. It had been issuing "LOW BATTERY" warnings for the past 2 days.
Sunday March 11, 2007 The new magnetic reed switch for the rain gauge arrived on Friday however, I was not able to install it until today. As of about 5 PM the rain gauge is back to being fully operational. Also, the Switch to DST caused some minor data timestamp problems. The major ones were fixed. Hopefully the few that may remain will not cause any problems and correct themself on April 1.
Monday March 5, 2007 Contacted Davis Instruments (manufacturer of the rain gauge) and they are going to send me a new magnetic reed switch -- free of charge! These switches are not expensive. A new one that should have worked purchased through an alternate supplier would have cost $1.25 plus about $8-10.00 of handling and shipping charges.. but free is better :-)
Saturday March 3, 2007 Was able to investigate the rain gauge problem in more detail. Discovered that the magnetic reed switch that is activated when the collection bucket tips has failed. A backup manual rain gauge was mounted and will be used to do manual updates following rain. The amounts should be good but the time of the rainfall will be off. Meanwhile I will be looking for means to repair or replace the rain gauge.
Wednesday 28, 2007 As of about 1 AM Monday the rain gauge has been stuck. At first I thought it was just frozen but 2 days of above-freezing weather has not clear it. Wednesday 6:30 PM I remove the funnel and the tip bucket appears to be free but it is still registering continuous rainfall tip counts. Must be a short in the line. Probably will not get a chance to look at it further until the weekend. In the mean time it has been dry and I am manually clearing out the rain counts so the graph looks correct.
Friday February 9, 2007 Ice in the rain gauge from snow earlier in the week and on Wednesday started to melt on Thursday 2/8 and caused the tip bucket to get stuck. Climbed up to free it Friday morning. At times during Thursday until Friday morning there may have been some strange rainfall numbers displayed. The bad data has been removed. There was still a small piece of ice in the bottom of the funnel that will get recorded when it finally melts.. someday. Maybe this weekend.

Through the winter, rainfall that is displayed may be from snow/ice that fell several days earlier.. which finally melted.
Sunday January 21, 2007 Discovered around 8 PM that wind data had not been updating since 10:40 PM Saturday. Weather logging box was in a strange state. May have something to do with the uptime counter rolling over. Killing and restarting the sampling programs seems to have solved the problem. Roughly 24 hours of wind and rain data was lost, however there was no rain during this period and winds were light.
Monday November 27, 2006 Relative humidity readings dropped out back on November 22. Reset did not fix problem. Replaced battery in base unit evening of November 24th. Seems to be OK now.
Friday October 27, 2006 Noticed during the day that the wind direction reading did not look right. Seemed too steady from the north since north = 0 volts from the sensor. Detailed data showed readings jumping between north and NNE at an odd rate. Later in the evening confirmed that the wind direction signal only has noise on it being picked up from the wind speed pulses wire inside the same cable. Nothing appears to be wrong inside. Hopefully Sunday I may get a chance to check outside. Meanwhile since probably sometime Wednesday Oct 25 afternoon the wind direction data is bad. Wind speed seems be OK.
Sunday October 22, 2006 Suspicious that rainfall on Friday had not been counted, checked the rain gauge and found it about 1/2 full of water and clogged with leaves. Estimated it had about 0.5 inches of uncounted rain. Adjusted data for Friday to include the missing counts.
Thursday July 27, 2006 Just before 1 PM temperature data dropped out and the sensor started returning a steady reading of 31 degrees. This was discovered around 7:30 PM. The outdoor sensor was missing! The sensors consists of a small plastic capsule on the end of small 2 conductor wire. Over the years I had noticed that this capsule would get bent relative to the wire. No idea why. Apparently this bending caused the wire to finally break. A spare sensor was installed and all is well again. The 6 hours of missing data will be approximated when I get time.. probably this weekend.
Monday June 26, 2006 7 PM. Rain gauge was clogged. There was a dead beetle in the bottom of the funnel making a perfect plug for the drain hole. The funnel was full of water. I let the funnel drain slowly so all of the water was counted. This resulted in about 1.6 inch rain spike at 7 PM. No way to really be sure how much rain really fell but probably was well over 2 inches. As time permits, I may "spread out" this 1.6 inches to more accurately reflect it falling over a longer period. Any new rain should be counted now.
Sunday June 25, 2006 Rain gauge is not recording properly. Most likely due to debris in the funnel. Hope to get a look at it by Monday afternoon.
Sunday April 30, 2006 Discovered about noon Sunday that the humidity readings went out again shortly after reseting the base unit Saturday evening. Replaced the batteries in the outdoor unit. No difference. Replaced the batteries in the base unit and readings returned. Batteries were last replaced in Sept 2005.
Saturday April 29, 2006 Humidity readings from the remote went out about noon Friday April 28. Unit was reset that evening but readings did not return. Reset again Saturday evening and readings returned. Will be keeping an eye on it. It may be ready for new batteries.
Monday March 20, 2006 Recalibrated barometer about 8 PM. Was reading about 0.03 low.
Monday March 13, 2006 Noticed some weirdness with wind direction readings. Probably started sometime Saturday or Sunday. Re-seated some chips and boards in the wind sensor interface around 10 PM and readings started looking normal again.
Saturday March 4, 2006 Power failed from 01:40:01 to 01:41:17 however for some reason the wind/rain sensor interface failed to come back up properly so there was no wind/rain data until the problem was discovered around 12:30 PM and corrected by 12:40 PM. Also loss of wind data overnight of March 2 - March 3 due to ice.
January 15, 2006 Very strong winds. Found indications that winds very likely exceeded the 63 MPH limit imposed by the sensor interface. The interface uses a counter which will overflow (wrap around like an odometer hitting 9999 and 0000) when the wind exceeds 63 MPH. Found a sequence of readings 52 55 6 5 58 1 29 which strongly imply that the 6 5 and 1 readings were actually wrap around of actual 69, 68 and 64 MPH winds. The reported readings were adjusted to reflect this.
November 16, 2005 It is strongly suspected that during rain in the evening of November 16, the relative humidity sensor got wet. It is very likely that the humidity did rise as shown however, it caused the constant high humidity reading through the night until the sensor dried out.
November 3, 2005 Discovered early the previous day that humidity was not updating. Forgot to check it that evening. Reset the base unit Thursday morning. Appears to be OK.
October 13, 2005 Discovered about 8:30 AM that the wind/rain interface seems to have failed again about 20 minutes after it was reset the prior evening. Reset it again and it came back up. As of 11 AM it seems to still be running OK. Result was no wind/rain data from roughly 8:00 PM 10/12 to 9:00 AM 10/13. I have been planning on building a new interface for a while now. Recent events will probably speed up that activity..
October 12, 2005 Brief power failure around 9:30 AM. The wind/rain sensor interface did not come back up so there is no wind/rain data updates since then. Will remain out until I get home about 6 PM. UPDATED 7:25 PM. Wind/rain interface is back up. Data now updating. A board had to be re-seated.
October 9, 2005 Recalibrated the barometer @ 8:00 PM. It was reading about 0.05" higher than all of the local NWS sites. Shows up as little .05 step in the barometer line on the graph.
September 27, 2005 Discovered about 10 PM that relative humidity readings had dropped out. This seems to happen from time to time and sometimes it will come back by itself. Decided to wait and see what happens over night. Wednesday morning (Sept 28) discovered that readings did not return and readings were missing from both remote sensors. Replaced batteries in the base unit about 8 AM and seems to be OK now. Battery was last replaced 7 months ago.
August 15, 2005 Thunderstorms came through just before midnight 8/14. Several close lightning hits and power went off at least 3 times over 10 minute period. Looks like when power returned after the first failure, wind and rain data was bad. Later confirmed there was a problem and replaced 2 chips on the interface board for rainfall counts and wind speed counts. The wind direction A/D chip is running very hot but seems to be working. Plan to investigate further. Looks like one of the close lightning hits was picked up by the sensor wiring. As of 1 AM 8/15 data appears to be OK. Total rainfall reading for the thunderstorm is probably a little low.
June 5, 2005 Rainfall June 3 and 4th but once again the rain gauge became clogged with tree debris and the total rainfall was reasonably accurate but the time and rate of rainfall had to be estimated.
April 4, 2005 Noticed that relative humidity line was flat at 59% from about 6 AM to 7 PM. Sensor was not updating. Reset base unit about 7:50 PM. OK now.
April 4, 2005 There was heavy rainfall on Saturday April 2. It is strongly suspected that sometime before or during Saturday, the rain gauge funnel became clogged with debris. This caused lower than actual rainfall readings on Saturday and for the funnel to fill up with water, and possibly overflowed. The most of the rainfall shown for Sunday and all for Monday April 3-4 is from the accumulated water in the funnel slowly seeping through the blockage and being actually counted late. Total rainfall shown of approximately 2.5 inches is probably close, but could be a little on the low side.

Update at 7:40 PM : Confirmed that the rain gauge was indeed clogged with tree bud debris. I allowed it to empty slowly to count the remaining water in the funnel. Since there was no rain today, I took the total for today of 0.74 inches and added it back into the Saturday data. The actual rate of rainfall shown for Saturday might be off a little but the total for the event should be pretty close.
March 16, 2005 When I changed the wind speed back to the old way on March 8, a bug was introduced which caused all wind speeds to be reported as 1/2 of their actual value. This has been corrected and all data from March 8 now shows the correct wind speed.
March 8, 2005 Discovered that the change made on Feb 18 in the way wind speed is measured is causing the maximum wind speed to be limited to 31 MPH. All of the wind gusts at 31 MPH during the day were actually higher. Changed it back to the old way about 10:30 PM.
March 8, 2005 Rainfall shown on Feb 25 is from snow on the previous day. Rainfall on March 8 is from a mix of rain and snow.
February 22, 2005 Minor glitch with the humidity sensor in the late evening. Replaced indoor and outdoor sensor batteries in the process but that did not appear to be the problem. Interference to the wireless sensors on 443 MHz from the 442 MHz repeater is suspect. Will require more investigation.
February 18, 2005 Change made to the way wind speed data is processes for gust readings. Gusts are now measured over a 4 1/2 second period instead of a 2 1/4 second period. This may result in generally lower gust readings .. but in some cases they could still be as high or higher. Hard to really be sure. Hoping to change so that I can measure then both ways and see what the difference actually is.. and then pick one.
February 5, 2005 Wind direction is OK again. Most likely something on the tower was obstructing the wind vane.
February 3, 2005 Looks like wind direction is out again. Most likely the same outside cable splice that keeps getting water inside. I hope to confirm tonight and repair over the weekend - if necessary.
January 25, 2005 Adjusted precipitation amount for Jan 22 to indicate the 10 inches of snow that fell. using the standard 10:1 snow to rain ratio. The rain gauge is still frozen and will remain disconnected until it thaws and empties. For the next few days any additional snowfall will be entered manually.
January 23, 2005 About 10 inches of snow fell on Jan 22. Snow in the rain gauge started to melt this afternoon but then later froze, causing continuous rain counts. Rain gauge was disconnected about 9 PM and extra rain counts deleted.
January 20, 2005 Precipitation shown around noon today is from about 1 inch of snow yesterday melting.
January 15, 2005 Problem with the wind speed sensor was identified and fixed about 2 PM. The problem was a loose piece of rope supporting Christmas lights on the tower became wrapped around the wind sensors [Oops!]. There appears to still be an unrelated problem with the wind/rain interface which is causing occasional bad readings. This will be worked on throughout Saturday afternoon and evening.
January 14, 2005 Starting about 5 AM wind speed readings are acting strange. They totally dropped out for a while then came back about 7 AM but were snowing intermittent drop outs all day long. The wind data collection program got totally confused about 4 PM and stopped collecting data. Reset it about 7 PM and showing zero wind speed. Under investigation.
January 11, 2005 Reset the wind/rain interface at 8 PM and it came back up. Some rainfall data during the day as been lost.
January 11, 2005 Wind data stopped updating about 9:30 AM. The sensor interface seems to have crashed. This also effects rain data.
January 1, 2005 Wind direction seems to be working OK now.
December 31, 2004 Thanks to the warm weather today (high of 52), I was able to get up on the tower to check out a connection that was suspect to be causing the current set of wind direction problems. The connection definitely was not in perfect condition.. so all 4 wires were re-spliced. Data seems to look better but too early to tell for sure. Will be keeping a close eye on it over the next few days.
December 21, 2004 Was able to get the wind/rain interface going however wind direction is not being measured properly. The most error seems to be for directions from S, SW, W, and NW with the recorded values shifted more towards south. Symptoms are somewhat similar to in the past when water got into one of the outdoor cable connectors, however, all of these problem connectors were eliminated a year ago. Will be investigating the problem, however doubtful that anything can be done until after Christmas.
December 20, 2004 Had been noticing that wind direction readings had seemed a bit off lately. Was able to confirm that there is indeed a problem that appears to be with the sensor interface. While investigating the problem, the interface appears to have failed completely. This causes a loss of all wind speed & direction data as well as rainfall data. Will investigate into it further this evening.
September 25, 2004 Near 10 AM humidity readings went out. This seems to happen at times when the base unit looses contact with the remote unit. Reset the base unit about 1 PM and readings returned. Was able to interpolate the missing data.
September 17, 2004 Have been suspicious of low rainfall readings over the past week or two. Found that the rain gauge funnel was clogged with "an unknown substance". This is the third time that unidentifiable stuff was found in the funnel. It is clear for now.
September 15, 2004 Relative Humidity base unit locked up about 6 AM Monday (9/13). Was not discovered until late on Tuesday (9/14). Was reset 8 AM Wednesday (9/15).
September 12, 2004 Wind speed is working again. Not sure why. The temperature/barometer sensor started reporting "low battery". Replaced the battery.
September 4, 2004 Wind speed has been dropping out at times for the past day or so. Seems to be getting worse. Under investigation.
August 19, 2004 Wind direction is fixed. Problem was a bad A/D chip in the interface circuit. Possible that it could have been caused by a nearby lightning strike.. but no way to know for sure. All wind direction data from late-July to 7 PM today is bad. It is hard to be sure exactly when the data started going bad.
August 14, 2004 Additional investigation of the wind direction problem points towards the computer interface for the direction sensor. A crude correction factor has been applied to the raw data to try to get the readings a little closer to reality while investigations continue. Error is the worst on the west side of south around to the north.
August 2, 2004 Something is wrong with wind direction readings. The azimuth reading appears to be about 1/2 of what it should be. Preliminary investigations revealed no obvious problem inside. Probably won't get a chance to look at it further on the tower until the weekend. Hope to also get a chance to fix the tower Web cam.
August 1, 2004 Relative humidity readings went out about noon. Discovered at 7 PM. Replaced the battery in the base unit and seems to be OK now.
April 28, 2004 Relative humidity readings were out for about 11 hours from roughly 8 AM to 7 PM. The tower camera will continue to be out for at least another 2-3 weeks.
April 6, 2004 Finally fixed a long outstanding bug in the graph generation program which messed up the x-axis date labels when switching from EST to EDT. It would skip the date of the change. Now the graph is labeled correctly.
April 4, 2004 The tower camera will most likely be out of service for the next several days.. probably until next weekend.
April 3, 2004 Finally got to climb the tower to investigate the tilted camera. I think I fixed it but in the process it looks like an intermittent power cable was disturbed and now the camera is not working. I hope to get back up there tomorrow and repair the connection.
March 18, 2004 Finally getting some melting and wind speed and direction are now working again as of 9:30 AM. The tower camera has also completely cleared up. Precipitation shown for Wednesday and Thursday March 17-18 is from melting of about 1 inch of snow/sleet on Tuesday March 16.
March 16, 2004 Wet snow and sleet today. Wind speed and direction sensors appear to have iced up about 6 PM. Also some ice/snow on the camera lens.
March 7, 2004 Problem with the outdoor relative humidity sensor starting about midnight Saturday. Corrected about 2 PM Sunday.
February 16, 2004 Tower camera went out again about 7 PM yesterday. The problem appears to be somewhere outside. It could be a while before I can investigate.. but it also could come back by itself like it has done before. Once again, about 2 PM today the camera seems to have returned on it's own.
February 8, 2004 Replaced a run of cable from the wind sensors with a single run of new cable. This eliminated several troublesome connectors and provides a more permanent fix to some temporary repairs that had been made over the past few months. Hopefully this should hold things for a while. Wind data is back online as of about 5:40 PM.
February 7, 2004 Problems with wind speed and direction beginning last night. Sensors taken offline 4 PM Saturday.
February 4, 2004 Tower camera came back online by itself about 6 AM. No idea why.
February 3, 2004 Tower camera is out again. This time it may be out for good. Under investigation.
February 1, 2004 Rainfall shown is from some melting from various snow/sleet during the past 2 weeks.
January 21, 2004 Added 3 new history graphs for Heat Index, Wind Chill Index, and Temperature & Barometer.
January 21, 2004 The tower camera has been OK for the past few days but not convinced that it is 100% stable. Problem might be temperature related. Still under investigation.
January 14, 2004 Added Minimum Wind Chill Index to the weather summary data. This is the lowest wind chill index during the maximum wind gust. It is possible that this lowest wind chill index may not occur at the time of lowest temperature or maximum wind gust. This function complements the Maximum Heat Index that was added this past summer.
January 13, 2004 The tower webcam has been acting strange today. The problem was first observed back on December 9 and appeared to be power supply related. Now the problem is back. The picture tends to drop out or change to strange colors. Will look into it first chance I get. If the problem is the actual camera, then not much can be done about it until we get some warmer weather.
January 11, 2004 The graph shows some periods during January 9-11 that may suggest that the relative humidity data was not updating. Data was being reported and updated, however it appears that the RH sensor may not have been responding to actual changes in humidity -- possibly due to the extreme cold weather during this period.
January 6, 2004 Found indication of a bad section of wire leading to the wind sensor. Replaced a small section of it and wind readings now look good again. All wind direction data from early December 2003 to January 6, 2004 is suspect. Some segments are definitely bad.
December 30, 2003 Seeing intermittent humidity data dropouts over the past week. Replaced the batteries in both the remote and base units. Hope that fixes it for a while. Wind direction has been out all week. Hope to get a chance to look at it in detail on Thursday.
December 18, 2003 There was another drop out of wind direction data from about noon Dec 16 to 6 AM Dec 17. Not sure what is causing this. I hope it is a simple cable/connector problem and not the actual wind sensor. Until it fails for an extended period of time it may be difficult to locate the problem. Will be keeping an eye on it.
December 9, 2003 3 15 PM - Picture on tower camera has gone out. 8:27 PM - Appears to be power supply problem. Camera is back on.
December 8, 2003 Wind direction mysteriously came back on it's own Sunday morning. Rainfall shown for December 7-9 is from 5-6 inches of snow on December 5-6.
December 5, 2003 Relative Humidity went out again about 8:40 AM. No image from the camera. Cycled power to camera at 6:15 PM and image returned.
December 4, 2003 For the second time in about a week I am seeing steady reading of NORTH for wind direction. First time was during a period of low winds and was somewhat believable. This second time it went to steady NORTH during moderate winds. A reading of NORTH corresponds to 0 volts from the wind sensor. This looks like there is a problem somewhere. Hopefully is is just a bad connection somewhere and not the actual sensor. I will be investigating further.. but probably not until the weekend.
November 29, 2003 Modified the Weather History page so now start and end dates are used instead of a start date and number of days.
November 20, 2003 Rain gauge fixed. A connector got wet and a contact corroded off causing loss of signal.
November 20, 2003 Found bad connection to rain gauge. Suspect that this has been a problem since sometime between November 8 and 12. Hope to have it repaired later today (hope it fixes the problem). Rainfall data for November 19 and 20 was approximated.
November 19, 2003 Rain gauge is not registering.
November 7, 2003 Replaced battery in temperature/barometer sensor at 6:25 PM. Caused slight jump in barometer readings.
October 24, 2003 Relativity humidity data was not updating from about 1 PM October 23 until 7 AM October 24. This is an ongoing problem where the video data just drops out then returns later. Possibly a loose connection somewhere but I can't find it.
September 18, 2003 Peak wind gust of 43 MPH from hurricane Isabel at around 8:20 PM, moved the webcam rotor system on the tower slightly off from vertical causing the picture to be slightly tilted. Should be an easy matter to reposition it.
August 25, 2003 Humidity data back about 9 PM. Not sure what the problem was. Started to work while I was checking it. Guess it just wanted attention and could go out again.
August 23, 2003 Humidity readings went out about 9 PM. Under investigation.
June 12, 2003 Found water inside on of the connectors in the wind direction/speed cable.. repeat of what happened back in November 2000. Bypassed the connector and wind direction is now reading correctly again.
June 11, 2003 For the past 2 weeks noticing that wind direction seemed to be more consistent from the SE - SSE than would be expected. Confirmed that there is a problem with the wind direction sensor. Suspect that water from all of the recent rains has gotten into a connector. Similar problem was observed back in November 2000. Looking into making repairs but it may take a few days. Looking back at the data, it appears that the data started going bad sometime about May 20-23.
April 24, 2003 For the past week seeing occasional relative humidity mis-reads which are reported as a very low (less than 10%) reading. Added some code to the humidity data collection program to try to capture additional information when this happens to hopefully find the cause so it can be fixed. Also still looking at the occasional wind speed dropout problem. It seems to come and go at irregular intervals.
April 8, 2003 Wind speed was not reading from about 2000 04/07 until about 1500 04/08.
March 7, 2003 Wind speed and direction are operational again. Rainfall shown for March 7 is from melted sleet/snow/freezing rain of March 6.
March 6, 2003 Freezing rain starting late morning has frozen the wind sensors.
February 20, 2003 Rainfall shown for Feb 18-20 is from melting of aprox 16-18 of snow on Feb 16-17. The amount shown is double what was actually measured since the rain gauge missed a good bit. Totals shown for the 3 days are a reasonable estimate. The actual amount was probably a bit higher.
February 16, 2003 9 AM Tower camera tilted down to protect from snow. Expecting 12-16 inches today. Web page image changed to the front yard camera.
February 7-9, 2003 Rainfall shown for February 7-9 is from 7 inches of snow overnight Feb 6-7.
January 30, 2003 Rainfall shown for January 30 is from about 2 inches of snow on January 29.
January 29, 2003 Replaced battery in the barometer/temperature sensor. Caused about 0.08 inch jump in pressure readings. Pressure readings tend to be lower as the battery gets weaker. The sensor was just beginning to issue LOW BATTERY warnings 2 days ago. Battery typically lasts 6-8 months.
January 10-29, 2003 Been having intermittent problems with the weather data collection computer. It has been crashing and doing other strange things for the past few weeks. Finally swapped out the PC with another one on Jan 26. Still seeing some intermittent unexplainable events.. but will continue to let it run for now. Hopefully something conclusive will eventually turn up. Because of this, there may be intermittent periods of lost data until the problem is identified and fixed.
January 16-17, 2003 About 1 inch of snow overnight. With the expected continued cold weather, it could be a few days before it melts and is registered in the rain gauge.
January 8, 2003 Rainfall shown for January 6-8 is from melting of about 2.5 inches of snow on January 5 and another inch on January 6.
January 4, 2003 Suspect that wind direction froze up from shortly before midnight to 6 AM. Perfectly steady wind direction reading for 6 hours. Conditions were right for it.
December 30, 2002 Lost relative humidity data again. Moved the indoor RH receiver to a new location just below the window containing the outdoor sensor. The receiver is now less than 3 feet from the transmitter. This better work. So far so good.
December 29, 2002 Rainfall shown for December 26-29 is from melting from snow/sleet on December 25. Total snowfall was about 1.5 inches.
December 14, 2002 Have been seeing intermittent dropouts of humidity data. Replaced receiver battery. See if that helps.
December 11, 2002 Freezing rain caused about 3 hour wind speed data drop out. Also blocked the rain gauge causing excessively high counts with it started to melt. Bad data was removed. Results shown should be reasonably close to reality.
December 6, 2002 10:00 AM : tower camera returned to normal. Rainfall shown for today is the melting of 9 inches of snow yesterday. It will probably continue into Saturday.
December 5, 2002 Snow began falling around 5 AM. Tower camera lens is covered with snow about 5:50 so video feed changed to front yard camera for now. Will be returned as soon as the tower picture clears.
Total of about 9 inches of snow fell through the morning and afternoon. Expected cold temperatures will probably keep snow in the rain gauge from melting for a few days.
December 3, 2002 Hard disk errors on the weather data collection computer about 2:15 PM caused loss of data until 6:50 PM. System recovered after a reboot, however, it looks like the hard drive is on it's way out. Attempted to replace the hard drive but could not get the system to recognize and boot from the new drive. Had to return to running with the old drive.. which could fail again at any time.
November 8, 2002 7:40 PM Reset the humidity receiver. Seems to have fixed the problem.
November 8, 2002 Starting about 1 AM the relative humidity reading became "stuck" at 61%. Data capture is working but for some reason the readings are not changing. Will be investigated further this evening when I get home (sometime after 7 PM).
July 15, 2002 Minor changes to the Web page display to now include a maximum heat index for days were the temperature went to 85 or above.
July 7, 2002 Power failure for almost 2 hours. UPS kept things going for about 40 minutes but about an hour of data was lost after that.
June 11, 2002 Two brief power failures at 3:40 PM and again at 4:15 PM caused loss of RH and wind/rain data until two systems could be manually reset at 6:45 PM.
June 8, 2002 Seeing intermittent RH data dropouts over the past few weeks. Replaced battery in receiver fixed it. Also replaced battery in sender.
May 14, 2002 Problems with the computer that gathers relative humidity data starting just after 12 PM. Moved the RH hardware to another system just before midnight. About 12 hours of RH data was lost.
April 6, 2002 Unknown system problem caused the weather recording program to stop recording data about 11 PM. The problem was not discovered until about 8 AM the next morning. About 9 hours of data was lost.
April 5, 2002 Cleaned out the rain gauge. Found a long seed stuck in the funnel hole which was probably the cause of the frequent sticking of the tip bucket that had been observed over the past few weeks. Also found a suspect bad connection on the wind sensor cable that may have been the cause of some funny readings earlier in the week. No more bad readings since then.
March 9, 2002 Moved some things around and accidentally bumped something with the humidity sensor which caused it to stop updating around 1 PM. Problem was not discovered until about 2 AM Sunday and was quickly fixed. Roughly 12 hours of humidity data lost.
February 22, 2002 Experimenting with automatically moving the tower camera away from the sun during sunrise. Goal is to tilt the camera down below the horizon at 6 AM each morning and then move it back up at 9 AM. These times will need to be adjusted from time to time over the next 4 months as sunrise gets earlier and earlier. This is to prevent the sun from shining directly into the camera during sunrise.
February 19, 2002 Moved the tower Webcam around more to the east to prevent the camera from being aimed directly into the morning sunrise. This is damaging the camera.. leaving faint 45 degree streaks in the picture. It's not that bad but will will get worse if nothing is done. Looking into a way to automatically point the camera away from the east in the early morning and then move it back later.
January 20, 2002 Got about 3 1/2 inches of snow yesterday. Tower camera snow melted OK about 9 AM. Camera will be pointed lower then normal today to be sure that the melted snow drains away properly. Precipitation shown on Jan 20-22 is from melting snow from Jan 19.
January 19, 2002 Started snowing about noon. Had planned to point the tower camera down to prevent snow covering the lens.. but waited too long. Picture turned to gray about 1 PM. Camera is now pointing at -88 degrees. As soon as the snow melts a little and falls out, the picture should return. Web page picture switched to the front yard camera which is indoors and is fine.
January 10, 2002 Precipitation shown is from melting melting snow/ice from the previous day(s).
January 9, 2002 Rain gauge is stuck at 11 AM.. producing continuous counts, or reading of 2.6 inches of new rain every 10 minutes. Counts are being manually cleared until it can be "un-stuck" when I get home this evening.. or it un-sticks itself.. which it did about 1 PM.
January 8, 2002 Precipitation shown between about 11 AM and 3 PM is melting snow/ice from the previous day.
January 7, 2002 Snow and freezing rain. Wind speed and direction froze about 6 PM. Wind speed returned just before midnight. Wind direction returned about 10 AM the next morning.
January 1, 2002 Minor software glitch caused slightly distorted wind speed readings from midnight until about 11 AM. Actual wind speeds were probably about double what is shown.
December 24, 2001 I think the intermittent wind speed dropout problem has been fixed. Found a bad connection. Still under investigation.
December 12, 2001 Added a live picture from the tower mounted camera to the main Web page.
October, 2001 For the past few weeks there have been several instances were the wind speed stopped reading. It looks like the magnetic switch in the sensor might be sticking closed. This causes no wind pulses to be produced for various lengths of time. Under investigation.
September 30, 2001 Relative Humidity (and calculated dew point) data was added.
August 12, 2001 For unknown reasons, the wind speed was reading continuous ZERO from 5:00 AM until just before noon. Looks suspicious.
July 29, 2001 Computer problems just after midnight caused loss of all data from 12 AM to 4:20 AM and then loss of wind and rain data only from 4:20 AM until just before noon. System ran out of memory for unknown reasons.
June 19, 2001 Wind direction problem corrected 11 PM. Interface computer problem.
June 17, 2001 Starting about midnight, wind direction reading continuous 360 degrees. Suspect that water from recent heavy rains may have gotten into the cable.
April 25-26, 2001 Wind direction may be having a problem. Data looks strange from about 5 PM 4/25 until 7 AM 4/26. Could be a bad connection. Will keep an eye on it.
March 8, 2001 Rainfall shown on March 7-8 is from melting snow on March 4-6.
March 6, 2001 Light morning snow. Rain gauge appears to be stuck. Producing continuous "counts". Probably due to ice.
March 5, 2001 As expected, wind speed sensor froze again about 3 AM. Was able to free it from the ground around 9 AM.
March 4, 2001 Winter storm. Late afternoon sleet caused the wind speed sensor to freeze around 6 PM. Was able to free the wind speed sensor from the ground about 9 PM. Still getting sleet and freezing rain so it may freeze up again overnight.
February 23, 2001 Rainfall indicated is from melting snow from 7 inch snowfall on February 22.
February 22, 2001 Weather computer (pete3) crashed about 1:00 PM. Was reset around 7:45 PM. Almost 6 hours of data was lost.
February 13, 2001 Overnight sleet and freezing rain produced a sudden count of 22/100 inch of rain at 8:10 AM. Suspect that the rain gauge got stuck again. Count was manually set to 1.
February 5-6, 2001 Winter storm starting early hours of Feb 05. Started as rain 4-10 AM, changing to sleet then snow about 10 AM at which time the wind speed indicator froze. Wind speed resumed about 9 AM Feb 06. Rainfall counts on Feb 06 are from melting snow. About 11" total snow.
February 3-4, 2001 Unknown failure caused loss of wind data from about 8 PM Feb 03 to about 10 AM Feb 04. This is second time where it just stopped updating the wind data and then resumed for no apparent reason.
January 20-21-22, 2001 Sleet and freezing rain starting 6 PM Jan 20 caused the wind sensors to freeze up. Wind speed resumed about 12:30 PM Jan 21. Wind direction resumed about 11 AM Jan 22. Rainfall shown on Jan 21-22 is from the melting snow/ice on Jan 20-21.
January 2, 2001 Moved the wind/rain data collection program from pete to pete3. Now all weather data collection is done on one computer.
December 31, 2000 Rainfall shown is from melting snow from snowfall of 5-7 inches on December 30.
December 20-24, 2000 Rainfall shown is from melting snow from snowfall of about 1-2 inches on December 19.
Monday December 18, 2000 Hard disk problem on pete3 caused loss of data from about 1500-1900 EST.
Thursday December 14, 2000 Determined that the battery in the barometer sensor was weak and was causing the low pressure readings. Battery was replaced. Readings are now normal. The large spike in pressure at 10 PM was when the battery was replaced.
Thursday December 14, 2000 Ice storm between about 2-7 AM caused some strange wind readings. Suspect that the wind speed indicator may have been frozen between about 3-6 AM. Also, NWS reported much more precipitation than was measured.. so there may have been ice problems with the rain gauge too.
Sunday December 10-13, 2000 Barometer readings appear to be from 0.5 to 1.0 inches low. Under Investigation.
Sunday November 19, 2000 Found another connector that water had gotten into. Replaced the plugs and connector. Wind direction is now fully operational again.
Saturday November 18, 2000 Confirmed that there definitely is a problem with the wind direction. Found water inside one of three cable connectors. Replaced the connector. Readings look a little better but still not right.
Thursday November 16, 2000 Beginning to suspect that something is not right with the wind direction readings. For the past few days, the sensor is positioned showing wind from the W-NW yet is returning a reading of SSE.
Sunday November 4, 2000 Wind sensors were raised on the tower from the 30 foot level to the 65 foot level. Sensor is now above all trees within 100+ foot radius.
Sunday October 22, 2000 New rain gauge installed at 10 foot level on the tower. New wind sensor installed at 30 foot level. Live data recording of wind and rain data begins about 2200 EDT.
Friday January 28, 2000 Begin recording of temperature and pressure data.

Last Updated Mon Aug 11 23:08:20 EDT 2008