FifeWeather.co.uk Site News

Forecast Page Issue

A problem with the data feed from our forecast provider is preventing our forecast page from updating properly at the moment.

Hopefully the issue will be sorted soon and apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Maintenance on Anemometer Completed

I didn't think today would provide suitable conditions for carrying out repairs to the station's primary anemometer, but by mid-morning the wind had dropped and the clouds started to break up. Needless to say, after the previous postponements, I took the opportunity!

So I'm pleased to report that the primary anemometer is now back online. This means the station windspeed readings have returned to 5 second updates (rather than the previous 15 second intervals when operating on the secondary anemometer).

Cancelled: Planned Maintenance 24th Feb

Once again, the weather has thwarted plans to repair the weather station's primary anemometer today. I was hoping the wind would die down overnight, but this morning it's still gusting well above safe speeds for the job.

At this point, the work has been postponed indefinitely, until a suitable weather window arises. As before, the station will continue to operate unaffected, thanks to the secondary anemometer.

Cancelled: Planned Maintenance 23rd Feb

Due to adverse weather conditions, today's planned maintenance on the weather stations' anemometer has been rescheduled until tomorrow (24th) weather dependent.

Planned Station Maintenance 23rd Feb

Next Thursday, the 23rd of February, the weather station's wind instruments will be offline for several hours in the morning, whilst essential maintenance on the anemometer is carried out.

During this period, windspeed and direction observations will be absent or intermittent. All other weather observations will be online as normal during the maintenance period.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Forth Road Bridge Status Added

We've added a new table to the Weather Warnings page, which shows the current status and any restrictions on the Forth Road Bridge.

We'll also automatically tweet any changes to the status of the bridge via our twitter account.

We hope you find the addition of this information useful.

Primary Anemometer Fault

The last month of very windy weather has taken it's toll on the weather station's Inspeed Vortex anemometer. The bearings in the anemometer have (understandably) gone sticky, causing the anemometer to under-report light wind speeds.

Thankfully the station still has it's backup anemometer, which has been promoted to the primary role until the weather permits repair to the Vortex. The only down-side is the wind speed updates will decrease from 5 seconds to 15 seconds whilst the secondary anemometer is in use.

As always, site news will be updated as soon as the Vortex is back online.

Rain Gauge Fault

Thanks to Alistair Donnachie and Gareth Dow for bringing to my attention, the fact the rain gauge had been failing to record rain for the past few days.

I have swapped out the faulty unit with a spare, and initial testing looks good. This afternoon's band of rain, that is just arriving in central Fife now, will be a good test for it!

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

BT Issues in Lochgelly Exchange

Update 23-12-2011 16:35 - By all accounts, this issue now seems resolved and our internet link has been stable since 7am. Again apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Unfortunately BT are reporting issues (again!) with the DSL Mux in the local exchange which is making FifeWeather.co.uk intermittently unavailable.

The issue has been ongoing since around 9pm last night. We can only apologise for the inconvenience and hopefully BT will have the issue resolved soon.

Severe Gales for Fife

It has certainly been a windy few days for Fife and indeed Scotland, but nothing unexpected for this time of year.

However the weather will up the ante tomorrow, when another low pressure system sweeps across the NW corner of Scotland.

The MetOffice have issued multiple warnings for both wind and rain, for Fife.

Forecasting model data certainly shows gale to severe gales are possible across the SE of Scotland, including Fife.

(Chart credit NetWeather.tv)

If you haven't done so already, now would be a good time to tether down any items in the garden, likely to get airborne in the high winds, such as trampolines.

There is a good chance the station's high gust speed may be equalled or broken sometime tomorrow or early Sunday morning. As always, the site will provide up to the second windspeed readings from Lochgelly.

Update on intermittent site outage

It appears our previously reported internet connectivity issues were caused by a fault in our local telephone exchange. The fault is now being reported as resolved by BT, after a lengthy overnight outage.

We will continue to monitor throughout the day but at this point, it would appear the situation has been resolved. Again apologies for the intermittent unavailability of the FifeWeather website.

Kind regards,
Graham Smith (Station/Site Operator)

Intermittent Site Connectivity Problems

We're currently experiencing an intermittent issue with our primary internet connection, which is causing the FifeWeather website to be slow in loading and/or intermittently unavailable.

A fault has been raised with our upstream provider and we're hoping for a speedy resolution.

Sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused in the meantime and further updates to follow.

Twitter Forecasts

Each day, at 07:30 and 19:30, our twitter account will tweet the forecast for the next 24-48 hours. The forecast is broken into 6 hour time-blocks as follows:

06:00 - 12:00 - This morning

12:00 - 18:00 - This afternoon

18:00 - 23:59 - This evening

00:00 - 06:00 (+1 day) - Tonight

06:00 - 12:00 (+1 day) - Tomorrow morning

12:00 - 18:00 (+1 day) - Tomorrow afternoon

18:00 - 23:59 (+1 day) - Tomorrow evening

Each time block will be addressed in a separate tweet.

The forecast data is derived from the site forecast.

Apologies for brief outages today.

Due to a catastrophic hard disk failure in the main FifeWeather internet server, I was forced to take the site down twice today to aid in replacement of the hard disk.

Thankfully, disk mirroring ensured no data loss occurred, and the system is now fully recovered.

However visitors to the site would have had difficulties making contact with the site briefly around 11:30 and again around 15:10 today.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,
Graham Smith
Site Admin

Free Android Weather Widget

If you've got an Android based mobile phone, you could get FifeWeather's weather data directly to your handset via this great (and free) weather widget:

(Click Icon)

The widget allows you to view weather station data from many different weather stations, including the FifeWeather.co.uk station.

If you visit the above link from your handset, you can download the app directly from the Google App Marketplace at no charge.

Station Alerts/Warnings

The FifeWeather station will now issue automated alerts and warnings, if certain alert criteria is detected within the real-time observations.

These new alerts can be view on the Weather Warnings page and they will also be tweeted via our twitter account.

The station based warnings and alerts should be used as information only. Always adhere to Met Office issued warnings.

A big thanks to Andrew from bordersweather.co.uk for his expertise and assistance in getting the alerts operational.

March Snow for Fife

It looks like winter is not quite finished with Scotland yet, as the models are showing cold air being dragged down from the North, come mid-week.

Initially, a low pressure system moving West to East, just North of Iceland, towards Scandinavia, during Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, is the culprit of the return to winter weather.

There is a very good chance Fife will see periods of snowfall, starting early Wednesday morning, possibly right though to the weekend and into early the following week. Although at that time-frame, the model output becomes less reliable. So the longevity of this spell of winter weather is still somewhat vague.

Update on weekend's snow potential

Today the MetOffice issued an advisory for Heavy Snow across higher ground in Scotland, for this coming Saturday. This certainly adds a little more confidence to my earlier model analysis, although the last few days have seen the GFS model runs show the snow risk as more borderline for Fife, compared with runs from earlier in the week.

Seeing what the models do with the setup over the next 72 hours will be critical to determining if this event is likely to have any significant impact for Fife. With the current modelling showing the setup as borderline, very small changes in the predicted positions of high pressure over Scandinavia, versus low pressure heading in from the west, will have a magnified effect on the outcome. This really comes down to a battle between the Atlantic and Scandinavian systems, with the UK caught in the crossfire as it were.

Again I will endeavour to keep the site news updated as the picture becomes clearer. However I suspect given the fine margins involved in this setup, the models will keep us hanging until the 11th hour!

Ultimately my advice is always to heed the MetOffice advisories and warnings. If you're following us on twitter, we will automatically tweet any advisories for Central Tayside and Fife, as they are issued by the MetOffice.

Chance of snow for Fife this weekend

For the past few days, the forecasting models have been hinting at a potential snow event for parts of Scotland and Northern England, for the coming weekend.

The timeframe is still such that there could be significant changes to both the severity and probability of snowfall for Fife (and indeed other parts of Scotland and the UK).

At present, there is a reasonable chance we will see the return of at least some snow this coming weekend (charts courtesy of NetWeather.tv).

As the timeframe closes in, and the models move into a more reliable timeframe, we should start to see better correlation between the models and more confidence in how the weekend might unfold. As that happens, I'll endeavour to keep the site news updated.

FifeWeather Twitter Advisories

If you're following our twitterfeed, you'll notice that our feed now tweets any MetOffice-issued weather advisories for Central Tayside and Fife.

We hope this is helpful to our local followers.

Connectivity Issues - Permanent Fix

Once again, apologies for the latest spate of downtime, which has now hopefully come to an end.

Our connectivity problems last week were temporarily resolved when a card was reset in the DSLAM in our local exchange. Unfortunately the reset of the card proved only a temporary fix, as the fault re-occured on Wednesday evening, downing FifeWeather.co.uk again.

i'm pleased to report however that the offending card in the DSLAM has now been replaced, and hopefully should spell the end of our connectivity woes.

Thank you for your patience during this frustrating period of downtime, and a huge thank you to Lee, the BT Openreach engineer who battled perilous roads to get here and help sort our issues!

Kind regards,
Graham Smith

Apologies for extended site outage

My sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused by the recent site outage. The main FifeWeather.co.uk site was unreachable from 21:00 on Monday night until just a few moments ago.

This was caused by a failure on a BT circuit and out with my control.

Many thanks for your patience during this service outage.

Kind regards,
Graham Smith

We're Now On Twitter

Good news for tweeps, as we're now on twitter. You can get hourly Fife weather updates directly via your twitter account. Simply follow @fifeweather and you're done!

The Big Freeze MkII

Confidence is now high that most parts of the UK will see snow towards the end of this week, as a cold airstream starts to flow into the UK from the early hours of Thursday morning.

The snow risk for most parts of Scotland is high from Thursday morning onwards, and the risk of disruption is high. Indeed the Met Office have issued advisories for heavy snow, covering both Thursday and Friday, for Fife.

(Chart courtesy of Netweather.tv)

As always, FifeWeather.co.uk will provide live weather data and weathercam images, to keep you updated throughout the period.

Snow Melt Rain Accumulation

As mentioned in an earlier site update, due to the snow melt now taking place, residual snow in the rain gauge will start to show as rainfall (even though conditions are dry).

So in case you were wondering why the site is showing rainfall, when the weathercam shows dry conditions, this is the reasons behind it. Unfortunately it's one of the limitations of having a non-heated rain gauge.

Video Of Snowy Conditions in Fife

The below video, depicting the severe snow we have had over the past few days, was shot this afternoon on my drive from Lochgelly to Kirkcaldy.

Snow In Pictures

A few images from around Lochgelly, Fife this morning.

Unprecedented Snow

The record breaking cold and snowy weather that we're currently experiencing has also brought with it, record breaking visitor numbers to FifeWeather.co.uk.

Apologies if the site is running a little slow, but the back-haul is quite saturated at the moment, due to the shear volume of visitors.

Yesterday we had over 1200 visitors to the site, more than we've ever previously recorded in a day. No doubt the high visitation rates will continue whilst the weather continues to make headlines.

Snowy Weather Headed For Fife

This week is likely to see widespread snow events across large parts of the UK, including Fife, as cold air is drawn down from the Artic.

The first decent chance of snow for parts of Fife is likely to be on Wednesday.

(Chart courtesy of NetWeather.tv)

However as the weekend draws closer, the cold airstream moves further south, increasing the chance of flurries across most of Scotland.

(Chart courtesy of NetWeather.tv)

The Met Office has issued advisories for Fife, starting from Thursday morning at this stage. It might be time to look out the snow shovels!

When viewing these snow events on FifeWeather.co.uk, please remember the FifeWeather weather station does not have a heated rain gauge. This means that the station may not show any precipitation during snow events, as the snow will simply sit in the aperture of the rain gauge. Once the snow begins to melt, the station will likely report this snow-melt as rain.

To herald in the cold snap, we've renewed our forecast page, which now features a meteogram for the next 48 hours and an improved data table. All the original, external forecasts are still provided at the bottom of the forecast page. As always, comments, suggestions and bug reports are most welcome.

Site outage caused by BT network failure

Due to an upstream BT network failure, FifeWeather.co.uk was unreachable from 19:05 until 00:52 last night. The major failure within the BT network's Edinburgh exchange caused most of Scotland and much of Northern England and Northern Ireland to loose ADSL broadband connectivity.

You can read more about the outage here:

http://bbc.in/ciwKt9

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. This has been the most significant outage to FifeWeather.co.uk in the past 12 months!

FifeWeather features in the Daily Record

The Daily Record published a feature article today on Amateur Meteorologists and I was rather excited to have been included in the article. You can find the article in today's Daily Record, or on their website.

Marykirk Weather Closes Down

As a result of the closure of the Marykirk Weather Station, the Mesomap, which was kindly provided by Marykirk Weather, is no longer functional and has been removed from FifeWeather.co.uk.

A suitable replacement can be found in the form of the Scottish Weather Network's mesomap.

My sincere thanks to John Hewitt for allowing me to use his Mesomap on FifeWeather.co.uk for the past 4 years! Marykirk Weather will sorely be missed!

Brief site outage around 08:50

Due to a need to replace the standby battery in the UPS unit that protects the main FifeWeather web server, I had to take the system down this morning for approximately 5 minutes. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

New Site Under Construction

FifeWeather.co.uk is now four and a half years old, and in that time it has grown a lot. The original template suited the site well, but now the site design has become cluttered and navigating the site is no longer as easy as it should be.

In the background, I'm working hard on a brand new site design. I'm about 40% of the way there, but still have some major technical challenges to overcome with the new design. I don't just want the new site to be a re-hash of the information on the old site, but rather a real step forward in the evolution of the site and what it brings to the community.

At the moment, I'm hoping to have the new site completed in the next 2 months, but I don't want to commit to a launch date at this stage. I will however continue to update this news section as I make progress.

The new site will be launched in one go, so don't expect to see any incremental changes. On the launch date (which will be announced here), the new site will be switched on and the old site will be retired.

If there is anything you would like to see on the new site, please don't hesitate to let me know via the contact page. I can't promise I can implement all requests, but I will certainly keep it in mind for the new site.

Best regards,
Graham Smith
FifeWeather.co.uk

T in the Park

With the 2010 T in the Park Music Festival looming, the location pointer to the festival grounds has once again been added to the WeatherCam.

This year's festival is being held from the 9th to the 11th of July.

Storm Forecast Added

Thanks to the UKASF, I've added a UK storm forecast widget to the Forecasts Page. You can read more about these storm forecasts on the UKASF website.

Vortex Anemometer Back Online

Seeing as the conditions were ideal yesterday, and I had received the required parts from the USA, repairs to the Vortex anemometer were carried out between 15:30 and 19:30 yesterday (21/04/10). During this time period, wind direction and speed should be considered erroneous.

The Vortex anemometer successfully went back online at approximately 09:30 today after completion of the recabling works following on from the repairs yesterday. So once again, the weather station is back to 1 second update intervals on wind speed.

Anemometer Degraded

The Inspeed Vortex anemometer is showing signs of exposure to the Scottish weather and is in need of replacement parts. Whilst it is still functional at windspeeds greater than 8-10mph, below this speed, the friction being caused by worn bushings is preventing the anemometer from turning.

Replacement parts on en-route from America. In the interim, as of 20:00 tonight, the FifeWeather website will revert back to taking readings from the original Oregon Scientific anemometer for wind readings, until the Vortex can be repaired. I'm hoping to complete repairs during the week commencing 26th April.

Note that wind direction readings are not affected by this issue.

Scottish Weather Network

FifeWeather.co.uk is now part of the Scottish Weather Network. You can view a comprehensive "mesomap" of Scotland, with readings from all member stations here.

Many thanks to Martin Collins for the warm welcome to the SCWN!

MetOffice Forecast Added

The Metoffice have made a small forecast widget available to webmasters. I have now incorporated the new Metoffice 5 days forecast widget into the Fife Forecast page.

The detailed yr.no forecast and Metcheck forecast are still present on the page as normal.

Monthly Stats Table for Cowdenbeath

The monthly statistics for the Cowdenbeath station have now been updated, and are viewable at http://www.fifeweather.co.uk/cowdenbeathrecords.html.

Upgrade to Weather Station Software

The weather station computer has been upgraded to the latest version of Weather Display and Weather Display Live. As a result, you may notice a few cosmetic changes to some of the graphics and some additional info on some of the graphics, such as the Weather Trends graphic.

Forecasts Operational Again

It looks as though yr.no have now sorted their issue and the detailed Fife Forecast is available once again.

Fife Forecast Currently Unavailable

Thanks to David for letting me know, the Fife Forecast sourced from yr.no is currently unavailable. This is due to an issue at the yr.no site, and not a local problem. Unfortunately this means there is little I can do to rectify this issue from this end. The forecast will be available again, once yr.no have corrected the issue at their end.

In the meantime, the MetCheck forecast is still displaying on the forecast page, although admittedly it doesn't provide the same level of detail as the yr.no forecast.

Disk Space Caused Outage

Unfortunately the server that the Fifeweather.co.uk weather website runs on, ran out of disk space in the early hours of this morning.

This prevented the weather station from updating the website from 4am to approximately 11am.

The problem has now been resolved and apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Snow Fall Video

Watch Thursday's snowfalls blow through on the FifeWeather.co.uk WeatherCam timelapse video:

Snow Brings Traffic To Site

It has always fascinated me how it's realistically possible to detect the arrival of snow, by the sudden increase of visitor traffic to the site.

Today saw the first flurries of snow for the winter, which deposited a modest amount of snow in the local area.

Here's the traffic analysis graph from the site this week, showing the sudden increase in traffic today, mirroring the arrival of the snow:

and again in higher resolution, showing the last 24 hours of traffic:

One thing is for sure, despite snow being a feature of most winters here, it still holds great interest for most of us.

Wettest Day Record Broken

The daily rainfall record was broken on the first of November, with a rather hefty 46.3mm of rain falling on this date. This broke the previous station record by over 10mm, to become the wettest day since the station started operating in February 2006.

High Wind Gust Record Broken

The severe weather warning for high winds certainly came with vengeance yesterday.

The high winds broke the stations previous all-time recorded high wind gust, with a new record high wind gust of 58.8mph.

This is since station records started in February 2006.

Post-summer Weather Station Maintenance

Today the FifeWeather.co.uk Weather Station underwent post-summer maintenance. This mainly consists of:

- cleaning the rain gauge tipping bucket mechanism and inlet funnel
- cleaning the solar panels for all sensors
- debris removal from temp/humidity sensors
- cleaning WeatherCam lens

The only likely noticeable difference might be some additional clarity and removal of obstructions from the WeatherCam view.

FifeWeather.co.uk Helps Identify Twister

Read the full story on the Fife Free Press website.

T in the Park 2009

As T in the Park 2009 approaches again, FifeWeather.co.uk gears up for another traffic onslaught from visitors seeking information on what weather the weekend might bring.

The WeatherCam has been updated to include a pointer to the T in the Park site, to help visitors identify sky conditions over the site.

Metcheck weather graphic reinstated.

As a result of feedback received, the old Metcheck weather graphic has been re-instated at the bottom of the forecast page, for those visitors that preferred this forecast.

New Detailed Forecast for Fife

Thanks to the kind folk at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, FifeWeather has a new, detailed forecast for Fife.

The forecast provides 6 hourly forecasts for the next 5-6 days ahead and is normally updated twice a day.

The new forecast is more detailed and should also be more accurate than the previous weather forecast graphic.

Unplanned Site Outage Today

Apologies for the site outage today, caused by a failure on FifeWeather's primary internet connection. Hopefully things are now back to normal.

Wind Instrument Upgrade Completed

I'm pleased to advise that today's upgrade of the wind instruments and mast extension was highly successful.

Hopefully the station will now be more effective at capturing wind gusts, and the new anemometer will also overcome the issues of the sticking reed switch in the old unit.

Wind Instrument Upgrade

If the weather co-operates, tomorrow (09/01/09), I will be taking the wind instruments offline temporarily (from around 9am to around 3pm), to carry out an upgrade. During this time, you may notice the wind speed and direction graphs will be flatlined.

The upgrade will consist of the addition of a Inspeed Vortex anemometer, which will provide 1 second update intervals for wind, hopefully greatly improving the capture of gusts. The mast is also to be extended by a further 5 feet, which will get the instruments further away from turbulence caused by the roofline and nearby trees. As always, I'll provide a further update tomorrow, once this work is complete.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

I'd like to take the opportunity to wish all visitors to FifeWeather.co.uk a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Site Performance Issue Resolved

Over the past 24 hours, the site has been performing slowly due to an issue with a stale cache file for the UK Weather Warnings feed, which was causing extended times to view all pages on the site. I've purged the problematic cache file and will continue to monitor to see if the issue re-occurs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fixed Introduced Mailing List Bug

The recent upgrade to WeatherDisplay had the unfortunate side effect of temporarily killing the mailing lists, due to an introduced bug in the software. I've found a workaround for this which I've put in place and the mailing lists now seem to be back in working order. Apologies for any inconvenience caused!

Realtime Display Upgrade

The realtime display has been upgraded to the latest version of Weather Display Live. There has been some minor cosmetic changes to the display, most of which were to accommodate the latest release. The most noteworthy change is the addition of a Beaufort wind scale readout in the centre of the wind speed display. This release also contains a bug-fix with the heat/windchill instrument which, under certain conditions, was displaying both readings super-imposed one another.

Software Upgrade

After testing on the development system, the weather station has just been upgraded to the latest version of WeatherDisplay (Version 10.37k). The new version shouldn't result in any major cosmetic or feature changes to the site, but as always, if you do notice something untoward going on, please feel free to get in touch.

Rain Gauge Outage / Site Outage

Due to an odd bug with the station console, a low battery condition in an unassociated sensor caused the radio link on the rain gauge to drop out. This has resulted in the rain gauge being offline from the early hours of the 1st, until the evening of the 2nd of August when I was able to do a channel rescan to reestablish the radio link. Hopefully I'll be able to make up the missing rainfall data from other nearby sources to keep the monthly/annual totals accurate.

Early this morning, a power supply failure in the main web server caused an outage of the site. Thankfully there does not appear to be any data corruption, and after installing a replacement power supply, things were back online from about 9:00am. Apologies for the unplanned outage!

Traffic Spike / Rain Radar Addition

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.

Rain Gauge / Temp / R.H. Replaced

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.

Rain Gauge Failure

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.

New Mobile Page

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.

New Wind Rose

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.

RSS Feeds Added

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.

Rain Radar Animation Enhancements

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.

Contact Us Page Revised

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.

Weather Warnings / Scottish Headlines

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.

Summary Image Enhancements

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.

Software / Weathercam Upgrade

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).

Changes To Weathercam Complete

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.

Changes To Weathercam

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.

Rain Radar Added

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.

Rain Gauge Upgrade / RH Update

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.

Relative Humidity Issues

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.

Tide Predictions Added

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.

AutoScale Graphs Added

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.

Realtime Display Update

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 hasbeen 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.

Hard Disk Failure

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.

Relative Humidity Calibration

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.

Local Metars / Climatological Reports

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.

Happy New Year!

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.

NOAA Mailing List Removed Temporarily

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!

About The Station Aerial Photo

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

Wind Streamlines Added

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

About The Station Page

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

Weather Stickers / Relative Humidity

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%.

7 Day Forecast

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!

Realtime Display Redesign

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!

WeatherCam Back Online

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! :)

Realtime Display Update

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.

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.

Weathercam Video Archive

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.

Weathercam

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, tothe 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.

Autoscale Graphs/Raw Log Files

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.

Site Outage/Mailing List Change

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.

Summary Image

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.

Acknowledgements Page Added

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.

Apparent Temp Instrument

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.

Cowdenbeath Records/Mailing Lists

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.

Site News Page Added

Site news page added to help keep visitors informed of changes and improvements made to the site.

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.