Average Wind Speed / Wunderground

[wildneg]

I'm currently using meteobridge. It works OK and set to upload every 5 minutes. It is pretty accurate with my acurite, compared to other stations in my area.

Two problems I have and i'm looking at replacing with a software solution are:
- wind direction (very random)
- wind gusts / wind speed

So the Wind Direction, i'm guessing MB when it is time to upload to Wunderground, sends the last reading. If I review the 15 second data, it is scattered everywhere but if you take the average of all the readings between the 5 minute uploads, it is almost the same everytime. So MB is obviously not sending an average for those 5 minutes, but something different. The charts on wunderground look awful. Other stations around me are very straight/clean.

2 of the stations use Cumulus software and their wind directions are very very close to the previuos except where it slowly changes to another direction. It isn't jumping S to N to E to W. Again, my average for the 5 minutes are very close to one another and are almost identical on the chart, IF it used the average. So does Cumulus, when uploading to Wunderground, use the last reading or the average of all readings from the previous upload to current?

The Wind Gusts part, again, MB must be doing something odd. I can go back and look at the raw data and for example, in the past 5 minutes, the gust was 18MPH. The average was 7MPH. It is uploading what appears to be the last reading and about 80% of the time, the wind gust is the same as the wind speed. So would Cumulus do the AVERAGE for wind speed int eh past 5 minutes and then the max value record in the past 5 minutes? The stations that use Cumulus look more realistic and have a different with Gust/Speed.

And it looks like Cumulus has built in support for updating to Wunderground. Does it offer rapid fire updates at least every 5 minutes?

Thanks for any info you can provide!

[steve]

Cumulus has an option to send the average wind speed and bearing to WU rather than the 'instantaneous' values. The average is calculated over the previous 10 minutes by default, but this can be altered by a setting in the cumulus.ini file.

For 'gust' it sends the peak value in the last 10 minutes (again, this is configurable).

Cumulus can send updates to WU at intervals down to 1 minute. When 'rapid fire' is selected, it sends the data every 5 seconds.

Note that Cumulus doesn't support AcuRite stations.

[wildneg]

Well everything sounds perfect other then the Acurite part. I'll keep looking at different software then! Thanks for the information though.