november 16, 2008 11:43am

Upgrade of WeatherDisplay Software

In the process of trying to resolve an issue with incorrect moonrise/set times (which is now fixed), I've upgraded the WeatherDisplay software to the latest version. There should be no cosmetic/functional changes as a result of the upgrade.

november 07, 2008 09:49am

Loss of Windspeed Overnight

The station hardware is yet again showing signs of it's age, when the reed switch inside the anemometer "stuck" due to a period of little to no wind during the past 48 hours. This resulted in zero wind speed readings, even after the wind picked up. Thankfully a "technical tap" unstuck the reed switch and wind speed readings have resumed.

No doubt this issue is likely to re-occur and I'll need to perform some maintenance on the wind instruments as time/conditions permit in the near future.

In the longer term, I'm going to need to give some serious thought to future station hardware as the existing station becomes more troublesome and expensive to maintain.

november 01, 2008 09:35am

Rain Radar Fix

After a change by Google to their GoogleMaps API, the rain radar that uses GoogleMaps, stopped working.

Thanks again to Gareth Dow, who both identified the problem and provided the solution, the radar is functional once again.

october 09, 2008 08:40pm

Rain Records Updated for September

The remainder of the rain inaccuracies from September, due to the intermittent rain gauge issues, have now been corrected in all areas on the site including the raw log files.

Also, the site experienced a brief outage this afternoon, around 16:30, as I had to replace a hard disk that was beginning to fail in the server. Thankfully the replacement went smoothly and the new disk has now been rebuilt back into the RAID array.

september 30, 2008 03:34pm

Back-end changes to WeatherCam

Over the past few days, I've been doing some work on the back-end of the WeatherCam and daily Time-Lapse video.

By and large, there should be relatively little impact to the appearance of things, with two noticeable exceptions.

Firstly, the daily time-lapse video format has changed from Windows WMV format, to DIVX/MPEG4 format (you may need to download a playback codec from www.divx.com). I've also decided to increase the video quality, such that the daily files will now be around 6MB in size (from around 2.5MB). I thought having this unique daily record of the weather was worth archiving in a reasonable level of video quality. This will obviously impact the time to download the videos, but hopefully the improved quality (and smoother motion) will be worth it.

Secondly, I've added more overlay weather data onto the daily video and smaller weathercam "history" pictures, such that it matches the information presented on the full-sized weathercam image. The position of the data is now static, so that it can be more easily read on the time-lapse video.

september 19, 2008 01:43pm

Rain Gauge Replaced

I'm pleased to report the rain gauge has now been replaced. I took the decision to replace only the gauge itself at this stage (and not the transmitter unit) as all the research I've conducted points to the gauge as being the most likely source of the fault and may save me replacing hardware unnecessarily.

I won't know whether the replacement has been successful until the next decent rain event. If the problem still persists, the next step will be to replace the transmitter as well.

september 16, 2008 04:32pm

Update on Rain Gauge and Data Correction

Today saw an unsuccessful attempt to repair the rain gauge, which is still exhibiting intermittent issues sending data back to the station console. As a result, I have ordered a replacement gauge and transmitter unit which should hopefully be here and installed within the next 24-48 hours.

Further to the issues experienced in August with the rain gauge, I have manually corrected historical rainfall data for August on all areas of the site, including the raw weather logs.

Thanks goes out (again!) to Gareth Dow, for providing me with his rainfall data from his Cowdenbeath station, which should be a reasonably accurate representation of what has fallen here during the times I was missing data. I will endeavor to do the same for the days in September that have also been affected by the ongoing issues with the Rain Gauge, after the end of the month.

september 13, 2008 04:23pm

Rain Gauge Woes Continue

Today the rain gauge went offline yet again at some point in the early hours, which resulted in the station not recording any of the overnight rainfall. It has mysteriously corrected itself this afternoon and it appears as though the fault is moisture related (not helpful for a rain gauge!!). I will be spending some time early next week (weather permitting) investigating the problem, which might require yet more replacement hardware. As always, updates will be published here.

august 31, 2008 07:54am

UK Metars Page Fixed

After migrating FifeWeather.co.uk to the new webserver, the UK Metars page refused to let visitors select any airport other than Edinburgh Airport.

This was caused by a change in a default parameter, between the old and new webserver software, and has now been correct.

august 27, 2008 06:09pm

FifeWeather Gets A Server Upgrade

Apologies for the interruption to service throughout this afternoon, as the FifeWeather.co.uk website was migrated to a new webserver.

The good news is, the bulk of the work is now complete, and the website is now running on a much faster, more resilient server.

There will be another short outage later tonight (around 20 minutes) as the weather station's virtual machine is also moved across to the new server. This will consolidate the weather station to one server, from two, reducing energy consumption by well over 50%.

As always, if you happen to notice anything amiss (as an unprecedented amount of work has taken place behind the scenes), please feel free to get in touch.