About our Weather Station
The weather station that powers our site is a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 Plus mounted on the roof.
View of the ISS looking West.
A close up view of the ISS looking East.
Looking Southeast.
Looking South.
Under the ISS.
There is a few different computer software/programs that is required to get the data from the outdoor station to our website.
Everything but the weather is customizable in this software. You can choose from over 1,000 different graphics and instruments, and you can also choose your colors. With this software, we send our data to: Weather Bug, Weather for You, and Weather Undeground.
Currently, we can run multiple weather softwares at the same time. This is done by a program called Virtual Vantage Pro (Virtual VP). This takes the inbound signal of the 9-pin serial port on the computer and splits it off up to 8 different places. A 4-wire cable that comes from the Vantage Pro2 Plus console is plugged into the serial port. Then, we configure each of the 5 programs to read off of each TCPIP port. Each program is assigned it's own TCPIP address. Then when configured correctly, each program communicates through it.
Besides Virtual Weather Station, I still run WeatherLink. WeatherLink automatically loads the archived data through Virtual Vantage Pro. Besides Virtual Weather Station, WeatherLink still runs. WeatherLink automatically loads the archived data through Virtual Vantage Pro, and distributes it to all of my weather programs running on my computer.
WeatherLink runs 1 cycle once a day for about a minute, so most of the load is on my other softwares. The other softwares we use are Vantage Pro Live (VP Live) by SoftWx and Cumulus by Sandaysoft. VP Live is now what currently uploads my data to the Citizens Weather Observers Program (CWOP).
CWOP is actually a branch of the National Weather Service. We're helping them create better forecasts for this region. Every time the software sends out our data, it gets a quality control check. This makes sure that the data is accurate. Currently, we are passing my checks by 100%. VP Live has the same capabilities as VWS, but doesn't have as many features. This is the one and ONLY job this program has. We upload at an interval of 5 minutes.
Cumulus has a role in our system. It also has similar features of VWS that are not used. It uploads current conditions to our Twitter page every hour and updates part of the Weather Station Status page. It only updates all the info near the top.
We hope this answers most of your questions about our weather monitoring system. If you still have questions, or would just like to comment or chit-chat, email us at andythompson@madeliasliveweather.com, or we are on Facebook or Twitter.
This site is a template design by CarterLake.org with PHP conversion by Saratoga-Weather.org.
Special thanks go to Kevin Reed at TNET Weather for his work on the original Carterlake templates, and his design for the common website PHP management.
Special thanks to Mike Challis of Long Beach WA for his wind-rose generator, Theme Switcher and CSS styling help with these templates.
Special thanks go to Ken True of Saratoga-Weather.org for the AJAX conditions display, dashboard and integration of the TNET Weather common PHP site design for this site.
Last of all, we would like to make a HUGE shout-out to Jay Hoehn. He has spent many hours helping us perfect the website and my whole system. Visit his website at Jay's Hardwood Furniture
Template is originally based on Designs by Haran.
