In March, and before then, my old weather station started doing some annoying things. Firstly it would not record rainfall consistently. Secondly the temperature readings were add odds with expectations (+/- 5C!).

It was time for an upgrade. However I wanted a weather station that still allowed me to upload to more than just Weather Underground. My old station had been customised to write to my own website and from there forward on to Wunderground and Met Office WOW.

After much research and a revelation about something called a Meteobridge I settled on the following:

• Davis Vantage Vue – https://www.davisinstruments.com/solution/vantage-vue/
• Meteobridge NanoSD – https://www.meteobridge.com/wiki/index.php/Meteobridge_NANO_SD

The first was purchased off Amazon as I had gift vouchers to spend from my 50th Birthday and the second was purchased from weatherspares.co.uk.

The NanoSD plugs into the back of the Vue Console, much the same as the very expensive but very limited Davis WeatherLink adapter does, and then allows you to configure all kinds of different uploads. It also has built in options for triggering regular activities and alarms.

As a result, I now have my weather data being uploaded to many more services than just WU and WOW. I have eight different weather sites being uploaded and I also hourly status tweets of the current weather.

With the old jasonmfarrow.com/weather template being out of support I was very pleased to learn that Brian at Weather34.com had updated the template to use the exact same Meteobridge & Davis setup that I have. This is probably the best weather data display out there. See the latest incarnation here: jmfweather.com

TLDR: A great upgrade with more functionality than I can use. Result!

Having seen the Wunderground having been taken over by IBM and the slow depreceiation of the API and other capabilities it will only be a matter of time before this dies!

I decided to find another place to post my observations and a quick google showed WOW “Weather Observations Website” from the Met Office. Considering that this was my first employer and that I’m still a weather nerd I signed up for an account.

The next challenge was to delve deep into the PHP code of my site to work out where and how to add the code to write the observations to WOW. After about four hours of trial and error I got it working.

JMFweather @ WoW

It’s taken me 5-hours of effort over the last day or two to get my webcam correctly reporting a picture for my weather station.

Problem:  The Wunderground FTP process has stopped working with no sign of a resolution. I needed to provide a single image that could be referenced by Wunderground rather than FTP to their site. The trouble was that my webcam uses incremental filenames based on date-timestamp. I also needed to use the latest and get rid of any other uploads.

Solution: Use the PHP code that runs my weather page and forwards the weather station page to Wunderground to, in addition, find the latest image file and after 5-minutes rename it to the static name image file and delete all the other potentially uploaded webcam files.

It took a lot of trial and error to get to the code below. All the while reading the online PHP reference and other PHP examples to get to what I needed. It’s not necessarily petty code but it does work.

<?php
// list the ARG*.jpg files in the webcam directory. Save to an array
$ARCfiles = glob('../webcam/ARC*.jpg');
// reverse sort the array to get the most recent file by timestamped name
rsort ($ARCfiles);
// grab the first (most recent file)
$fileselected = $ARCfiles[0];
// setup the logging file and write the selected file to the logging file
// $latestfile = '../webcam/latestwebcamfile.txt';
// file_put_contents($latestfile, $fileselected);
// check that the webcam image is 5-minutes old. If so overwrite it with the latest and delete all other ARC*.jpg files.
if(file_exists('../webcam/webcamimage.jpg')&&time()- filectime('../webcam/webcamimage.jpg')>300){&nbsp; &nbsp;
   rename($fileselected , '../webcam/webcamimage.jpg');&nbsp; &nbsp;
   // list then delete every file beginning with ARC*&nbsp; &nbsp;
   $files = glob('../webcam/ARC*.jpg');&nbsp; 
   foreach($files as $file){ 
      if(is_file($file)){ 
         unlink($file); 
      }&nbsp; &nbsp;
   }
}
?>

I used to work, it was my first job after leaving school, for the Met Office as an Outstation Observer. This meant that I had to look out at the world every hour and record what was going on. Temperature, Rainfall, Wind speed & direction, Atmospheric Pressure, Cloud etc. This has resulted in a life-long interest in the weather.

I have had for some time my own personal weather station recording all of these things. In March 2016 I upgraded and bought a more capable weather station that uploads to Weather Underground (wunderground.com).  My station is identified as IBASINGS39. You can click on that link, or the one in the left hand menu, to see the current data.

Recently I saw an update for my weather station console including a new server interface that presents the data in a different way. This came from Weather34.com courtesy of Brian Underdown. Whilst seemingly quite simple to deploy the process of tweaking my weather console to correctly update to my own website took two days of tweaking and experimenting with support from Brian (Thank you).

The result of these labors can be see here.