Following are the changes and updates made to the site, in reverse chronological order. Keep and eye on this page to get the latest information on new features and additions to the site.

12 July 2008
A new "Mini" UK rain radar has been added to the rain radar page, above the GoogleMaps based rain-radar. This will hopefully be useful for folk using browsers that are unable to correctly display the GoogleMaps based radar, which doesn't work particularly well with older versions of Internet Explorer.

Also, in the past 48 hours, the site has been hit with heavy visitor traffic, as revellers heading to "T in the Park" check out the weathercam and weather information, for the big festival near Kinross. The increased traffic started to flood in on Thursday morning, when a link to the weathercam was posted on a forum associated with the festival. Since then, the site has seen unprecedented levels of traffic (see the traffic graph snapshot below).



Apologies if the site has been a little slower than usual, due to the increased traffic. Things will no doubt quieten back down after Monday, when the festival ends.

8 May 2008
Both the rain gauge transmitter and temp/humidity sensor have now successfully been replaced (thanks to the arrival of the replacement units this morning). The rain gauge is now back online and fortunately, as best as I can tell, there was no rainfall during the period the rain gauge was down. I've also been able to remove the calibration slope from the humidity sensor now that this has also been replaced.

7 May 2008
The Rain Gauge transmitter has again fallen victim to moisture and this time, the damage is terminal. As a result, the rain gauge is currently offline until the replacement transmitter arrives (hopefully tomorrow, Royal Mail dependent). I have also taken the opportunity to purchase a replacement external temperature/humidity sensor, due to the ever increasing calibration that I'm needing to apply to the humidity sensor to keep it in calibration. Once the new temp/humidity sensor is installed, I'll be able to remove the calibration slope entirely. As always, I'll update the site news once each of the above issues have been resolved. Apologies for any inconvenience caused in the meantime.

19 April 2008
A new mobile version of FifeWeather.co.uk has been launched today, replacing the old WAP1.0 page. The new page, built specifically for display on mobile phones, is dynamically generated so data is always up to the minute accurate. With minimal graphics, the new page should provide quick loading times for checking out the current conditions when you're on the move. The page is even browser friendly, so you can preview what the page will look like on your mobile phone at wap.fifeweather.co.uk. Thanks to Jim McMurry for providing the code base for the page.

18 April 2008
A new direction vs. speed wind rose has been added to the Wind Direction page, providing a clearer graphical representation of the wind speeds for the current month.

27 March 2008
RSS Feeds of live weather data from the station are now available for subscription in your favourite RSS news reader, or even your iGoogle homepage. The new RSS Feeds page contains full details of how to subscribe to the available feeds. More feeds may be added, or existing ones expanded, depending on demand. I must acknowledge the support of Paul McLaren for not only his assistance in helping out with testing, but also giving me the impetus to finally get these feeds off the ground! Thanks also to Dave Keller for providing his RSS PHP libraries which formed the basis of the functionality for the RSS feeds.

19 March 2008
The Rain Radar has been updated to display a 3 hour animated loop, rather than the previous static radar image. This should help to identify the direction bands of rain are moving in. My thanks goes out to Gareth Dow for his assistance in getting this right.

13 March 2008
A Contact Us page has been added to the site, which allows visitors to send us messages without needing an e-mail client on their system. This replaces the old "mail to" link, which was previously the only way to get in touch.

3 March 2008
Two new additions have been put live on the site tonight. Firstly there is now a weather warning page, detaling the latest flash warnings and weather warnings for the U.K., direct from the Met Office. If there are any current warnings issued for the U.K, the menu item will be highlighted in red, otherwise it will appear as a normal menu option. Warnings for Fife will also be highlighted in red inside the warnings page.

Secondly, there is a new Scottish Headlines page, bringing you the latest headlines from the BBC newsroom. As with all new additions, please let me know if you notice any strange anomalies with these two new pages, in case I missed anything during testing.

23 February 2008
The Summary Image on the home/main page is now updated from the real-time data and is updated on the fly. What this means (in plain english) is that the image will always be up to date, whenever the page is refreshed. This is still in "beta", as I only wrote the code today, so apologies if there is any weirdness with the image, over the next few days as any bugs come to the surface. You might notice a slight change in fonts to the statically generated image used previously.

Update: Another small cosmetic enhancement has been added, which now provides a random background picture for the summary image, from Lochgelly and the surrounding area, taken from my photo gallery at ScotlandScenery.com.

9 February 2008
The weather station software has now been upgraded to the latest version of Weather Display. You may notice some minor cosmetic changes to some of the weather graphics (wind direction plots are now in colour for example) but otherwise, the functionality of the site should be largely unchanged. I'm hoping to bring some enhancements to the site in the near future, incorporating new features from the latest version of the software, which was the main motivation for the upgrade. These enhancements will be announced here as and when they are implemented.

Improved WeatherCam now in operation. The improved WeatherCam page includes an image twice the size of the old page, and the picture/stats now update every 15 seconds. The WeatherCam history will remain the same size/update frequency, as will the time-lapse videos. Only the main live WeatherCam image has been changed (both on the WeatherCam page and inside the Real time display).

30 January 2008
Changes to the WeatherCam have now been completed, with the camera being out of action for part of the day today, whilst the work was carried out. The position of the weathercam has changed slightly due to the new mounting location, however this has been minimised as much as possible.

16 January 2008
Changes to the WeatherCam will take place over the next week or so, as I need to relocate the camera to a more convenient location. During this time, the position of the WeatherCam may vary a number of times. I am having to mount the camera into a waterproof housing, which will ultimately be mounted externally. I'm trying to carry out the work in a phased manner, to minimise the downtime to the camera during the works, although the final stages will undoubtedly require some downtime during daylight hours.

8 January 2008
Rain Radar has been added to the site, providing up to date radar imagery of precipitation over both the UK and Europe. The radar, based on google maps, can be zoomed and panned for greater detail. Thanks to Meteox.com for granting permission to utilise their radar imagery.

20 December 2007
Rain gauge upgrade and update on humidity. A successful upgrade has been completed on the rain gauge which will now provide for just over 0.35mm resolution (compared to the previous 1mm resolution). This should improve the ability of the gauge to capture shorter passing showers that might deposit under the 1mm of rain per episode. Also in the interim, I have applied a more aggressive calibration slope to the humidity sensor, which now seems to have settled down. I will continue to monitor the hygrometer and if it deteriorates further, will look at a replacement unit.

27 November 2007
Relative Humidity readings have started under-reading again, after a service of the Temp/Humidity sensor last week. I'm in the process of sourcing a replacement sensor, which should also then allow me to remove the calibration applied earlier in the year. I'll update this site news page once the replacement is complete.

2 September 2007
Tide Predictions page added to the site. The predictions are for the port of Burntisland, which is the closest port to the Lochgelly Weather Station and are updated at 6am daily.

20 May 2007
New AutoScale Graphs added to both the 24 Hour and Weekly/Monthly graph pages. The new graphs consist of a 24 hour rain graph and also 30 day hi/lo temp, baro, rain & average windspeed graphs. Thanks goes to "Carterlake" from the Weather-Watch.com forums, for providing the basis of the code for the new graphs.

7 May 2007
Realtime Display updated to the latest version of WeatherDisplay Live, which now has a minimum requirement of Flash V8.0 or higher. Whilst there is no major changes in this version, the upgrade has been put in place, in preparation for upgrading the Weather Station to a more recent version of WeatherDisplay, to address some outstanding issues with the current version.

6 April 2007
Dew Point/Relative Humidity Calibration has been applied, due to the consistenty low humidity readings produced by the humidity sensor of the weather station. Despite having replaced the hygrometer late last year, the replacement sensor has gone out-of-calibration once again in a very similar fashion. Rather than repeat the cycle, I have applied a software based calibration, based on readings from two nearby stations. The point of re-calibration can be clearly seen in today's graphs as a sudden jump in Dew Point/R.H.

10 February 2007
A hard disk failure in the weather station computer affected the website today, causing intermittent updates to all pages and the weathercam this afternoon. Fortunately I have been able to swap out the faulty hard disk and rebuild the system fairly quickly, without the loss of any significant quantities of data (thankfully the loss of data can be measured in minutes). Things should now be back to normal with the exception of today's all day video, which will not be produced tonight.

21 January 2007
The Local Metars page has been revamped and expanded into a new UK Metars page. The new page allows visitors to view reports from any of the numerous reporting Metar weather stations around the UK, by selecting the station from a drop-down list. The new page defaults to Edinburgh Airport, as this is the closest reporting Metar to the FifeWeather.co.uk station. Note that not all UK sites will report data all of the time and additionally, some sites (like Leuchars Airbase) can quite often fail to report data on a regular basis. So it pays to check the age of the report, as quoted on each report issued.

Climatological Reports added, providing extreme and average values for each day of the month (for monthly reports) and each month of the year (for the annual reports). The values detailed in the reports include temperature, dew point, wind speeds, snow depth and barometric pressure. Monthly reports are published shortly after the end of the month, whilst annual reports are published at the start of the new year. A full set of reports for 2006 (since the station commenced operation in February) are now available.

1 January 2007
Happy New Year to all FifeWeather.co.uk visitors! Unfortunately it wasn't such a happy new year for the station, as when I checked it this morning, I discovered that WeatherDisplay had crashed at 00:05 (when it tried to do the end of year run). Unfortunately this means the station stopped recording weather data from this time, until when I was able to get things back online a short time ago (about 7:15am). Fortunately the station console records extremes also, and no record occurring events (such as high wind gusts) took place after the software crashed. All the exciting weather seemed to take place earlier in the evening (peaking around 10pm), when things were still ticking along nicely.

22 December 2006
Monthly NOAA Report Mailing List has been temporarily removed, due to issues with the current version of software which is not sending the NOAA report correctly. All of the other weather report mailing lists are fully functional and will continue without interruption. The monthly NOAA report mailing list will return as soon as I have resolved this glitch with the software. Apologies for any inconvenience caused!

23 November 2006
Aerial Photo added to the About The Station page, to give a better idea of the geography around the station.

11 November 2006
Wind Streamlines page added, showing the wind streamlines over both the UK and Europe. The images are updated every 60 minutes.

5 November 2006
About The Station page added with some site information and a few photos of the FifeWeather station itself.

28 October 2006
Weather Stickers allow you to add live weather data from FifeWeather.co.uk to your own websites. Two styles of weather stickers are available and the provided HTML code will help you get the stickers up and running on your website in no time!

Relative Humidity Sensor Replaced a little sooner than expected. Thanks to the efficiency of the staff at the UK Weather Shop, the replacement hygrometer arrived today and is now installed and operational. The effects were immediately noticeable with a jump of 8% in the R.H. readings after the new sensor came online and for the first time in over a month, the station is now recording R.H. over 91%.

27 October 2006
7 Day Forecast for Fife, added to the main menu. The forecast is provided by metcheck.com and you can click through to their site from the forecast itself. Due to the addition of this comprehensive forecast, the weather station's forecast icon has been removed from the home page.

Relative Humidity Sensor Issues on the weather station are currently causing the humidity/dew point to under-read from the true value. I would estimate the station is currently under-reporting RH by around 10%, since around the start of October. A new sensor is on order and should be here early next week. Apologies for any inconvenience caused!

24 September 2006
Realtime Display screen redesigned, to better incorporate the new weathercam. Also a new 'units' button has been added which allows visitors to set their own unit preferences and optionally save them for subsequent visits. Other changes include the consolidation of the wind instruments to a dual average/gust gauge, the addition of a Sun and Moon panel, the addition of a Dew Point instrument and a gauge style Barometer. Feedback on these changes are most welcomed!

13 September 2006
WeatherCam is back! And better! A superior quality camera (which will hopefully last a little longer this time!) is providing sharper images with better internal resolution. Apologies for the previous break in transmission, but normal programming has now resumed! :)

12 September 2006
Realtime Display software updated to the latest version of WeatherDisplay Live. The most notable change in this update is the addition of trend indicator arrows on the temp/humidity gauges.

11 September 2006
WeatherCam failure. Unfortunately the WeatherCam has died a sad death after only a week in operation. Replacement hardware should be here soon and the camera will be back online within a few days. Check back here for updates.

9 September 2006
WeatherCam Video Archive added to site. Every day, the WeatherCam images are compiled into a 60 to 90 second time-lapse video, covering the daylight hours of the entire day. The video for the previous day is always available on the WeatherCam page itself. However the new video archive (available under the historical menu selections) will contain all previous time-lapse videos, available for viewing/download. The archive currently contains videos going back to when the WeatherCam was brought online on the 3rd of September, however the archive will grow over time.

3 September 2006
WeatherCam added to site, providing near-live images of current weather conditions, from the FifeWeather station. Images from the weathercam are also compiled into a time-lapse video throughout the day, allowing visitors to view a super-fast motion replay of the day's weather, to the current time. The time-lapse video can be viewed/downloaded from the WeatherCam page. There are more features to be added to this page in the near future too.

13 August 2006
24 Hour Autoscale Graphs added to the 24 Hour Graphs page. These graphs plot temperature/humidity and windspeed/barometer on an automatically sizing scale, based on the current data. This should provide higher resolution graphs from the present time to T minus 24 hours. The classic combined graphs are still included below the new autoscale graphs.

Filename format change to raw log files, to provide for better on-screen ordering. The raw log files for both this station and the Cowdenbeath station have been changed to a YYYYMM.csv format, which produces a more sensibly ordered list.

27 July 2006
Apologies for Site Outage, which affected the site from around mid-day to shortly before 5pm today. A power disruption caused a network switch to fail to restart correctly, which prevented the weather station from updating the website. Fortunately no weather data was lost and all site information is now updating normally again. The outage would also have prevented any scheduled weather report e-mails from being sent to the weather mailing lists, however once again these should now be operational.

Minor Mailing List E-mail Change, with the addition of the Apparent Temperature reading, giving a "real feel" temperature based on a combination of wind, humidity and of course, the current temperature. Also, the "Yesterday's High/Low" data has been moved down next to the current Min/Max readings. Preview a sample of the new mailing list e-mail format.

18 July 2006
Summary Image on the home page re-designed. As well as a complete make-over, the new summary image now also features an Apparent Temperature reading, giving a "real feel" temperature based on a combination of wind, humidity and of course, the current temperature.

16 July 2006
Acknowledgements page added (here). This has been long overdue as there are many, previously unnamed folk who have contributed to the success of this site.

08 June 2006
Apparent Temp instrument added to the Real-time Display. The Humidex/Heat Index and Wind Chill instruments will now auto-swap based on which instrument will provide the most accurate reading for the current temperature.

04 June 2006
Cowdenbeath Station Records Added providing a wealth of current and historical information about central Fife weather dating back to late 2001.

NOAA Style Monthly Report Mailing List Added which will automatically e-mail subscribers a complete monthly NOAA style weather report shortly after the end of each month.

15 May 2006
Site News Page Added to help keep visitors informed of changes and improvements made to the site.

24 April 2006
Weather Report Mailing Lists Launched! You can now get FifeWeather.co.uk weather reports delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to one of the weather report mailing lists. There are currently 3 lists to choose from, depending on how regularly you wish to be updated with the current conditions, ranging from every 3 hours, to once a day. Visit the Weather Mailing Lists page for more details.