Forecast

[Bob]

Hi Steve,

Hope all is well.

Some weather station produce a forecast.....your for instance is saying at the moment.

"Forecast: Increasing clouds with little temperature change. Precipitation possible within 12 hours, possibly heavy at times. Windy. "

Most weather stations don't produce a forecast.

Do you think it would be possible for Cumulus to produce one....presumably the forecast is just related to current/past conditions and probably there are only a certain number of different forcasts output!

Cheers

Bob

[steve]

Bob,

Apparently, the Davis has 198 different forecasts. I don't know the details of where it gets them from, but yes, it will be something to do with pressure trends, wind direction, etc. Some stations just have 'rainy', 'cloudy', or 'sunny'.

While I'm happy for Cumulus to pass on the forecast if the station supplies one, I don't propose to put anything into Cumulus to generate them, as they're rather frivolous, and the Met Office and others do it much better.

What I probably will do at some point, is add support for TAF/METAR decodes, and other online weather reports/forecasts.

Steve

[broadstairs]

For anyone who wants serious weather forecasts produced locally you should look at WXSim and you can see my forecast page here, although it must be said that currently WXSim will only read Weather Display and Weatherlink logs for input to the forecast. I'm sure that if there is enough interest in the future Tom (WXSim author) would look kindly at including Cumulus logs as well. WXSim is serious software but well worth a close look if you are interested in forecasting.

Stuart

[steve]

Fascinating. I'd looked briefly at this before as I find modelling interesting. I never got around to trying it. What I didn't realise is that you can put data from your own weather station in as input, to get a local forecast. I'll have to investigate this further!

Steve

[steve]

Oh. I thought it was free

[TNETWeather]

Nope... not free. Very good... and can be a large learning curve.

Most people I know are more interested in running them in Automatic mode, which works pretty good. If you are really into forecasts, it is a very very good package.

The data it collects from the local station includes:



So Cumulus would need to come up with most of that to a file that could then be imported into the wxsimmate module.

Some of the missing data would be available when Cumulus starts reading the solar sensors (Davis).