Newbie questions

[Blackmyre]

I've just got one of these weather stations (£70 from Maplin), and I'm really quite impressed with it for the price. As I expected, the bundled software is strictly limited, but Cumulus seems a superb alternative. I've got a couple of questions though:

- Relative Pressure I expected that I would have to enter the station's elevation AMSL to allow it to display a corrected pressure, but it seems to require a corrected value to be fed in directly. I don't have another barometer from which to get such a calibrated value, so I'm not sure how I should go about doing that. Should I just enter the pressure reported from a nearby reliable source?
- Sampling frequency I note that the generated "gauges" web page has real-time wind data, updated every 3 seconds by default. However, I gather from previous postings that these units only sample data every 48 seconds. Is wind data separate and collected more frequently, or should I set my real-time period to 48 seconds also?

[steve]

- Relative Pressure I expected that I would have to enter the station's elevation AMSL to allow it to display a corrected pressure, but it seems to require a corrected value to be fed in directly. I don't have another barometer from which to get such a calibrated value, so I'm not sure how I should go about doing that. Should I just enter the pressure reported from a nearby reliable source?

I don't really know much about these stations (I don't own one), but I believe that is what you have to do, yes.

- Sampling frequency I note that the generated "gauges" web page has real-time wind data, updated every 3 seconds by default. However, I gather from previous postings that these units only sample data every 48 seconds. Is wind data separate and collected more frequently, or should I set my real-time period to 48 seconds also?

I believe the station updates all its data at 48-second intervals. You probably want a compromise for your realtime update interval - bear in mind that everything's asynchronous; Cumulus doesn't know when the station has updated (so it reads the data every 10 seconds to try to catch it reasonably quickly after it's updated), the web page doesn't know when the data has changed, etc. The data won't change more often then every 48 seconds, but you may introduce a further delay before new data appears if you have a 48 second interval. It depends on how important it is for you to have the gauges update as soon as possible after a new reading.

Steve

[Budgie]

For the relative pressure then you're quite lucky that you have at least 3 stations close to you to take the measurement from and compare.
RAF Kinloss: http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/EGQK.html
RAF Lossiemouth: http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/EGQS.html
Elgin Weather: http://www.elginweather.co.uk/

Elgin Weather is updated every minute or so and the other two are updated every 30 minutes.

[Blackmyre]

Thanks both, that all makes sense. Kinloss is the station I tend to use for local weather (less than nine miles, as the Tornado flies).

[dc1500]

Yes set the relative pressure using Easyweather and anything else you need to adjust or reset before starting upt hen try and ditch Easyweather completely. As has been said before, don't run Cumulus and Easyweather at the same time.
Dave

[harrym1byt]

The easy way is to run the EasyWeather software and make adjustments in its settings which then get tranferred over to the display.

The most accurate method I have found, is to look at a known to be accurate station as close as possible, which will give a figure every 30 minutes. The data will be old by the time it is posted on the website, so you need to look at your records for the same time their data was logged, to see what the difference is - work out the difference + or - then make a suitable adjustment to the relative figure settings in EW.

That should get you fairly close quickly, but you can then fine tune the figure later should you find any small inaccuracy.

[harrym1byt]

The easy way is to run the EasyWeather software and make adjustments in its settings which then get tranferred over to the display.

The most accurate method I have found, is to look at a known to be accurate station as close as possible, which will give a figure every 30 minutes. The data will be old by the time it is posted on the website, so you need to look at your records for the same time their data was logged, to see what the difference is - work out the difference + or - then make a suitable adjustment to the relative figure settings in EW.

That should get you fairly close quickly, but you can then fine tune the figure later should you find any small inaccuracy.

[steve]

I kind of miss the Tornadoes, we used to live in Glenlivet. We would sometimes go through Dallas when taking the scenic route to Elgin. Although 'scenic route' is something of a tautology when talking about that part of the world

Steve

[Blackmyre]

That would be along the road from Knockando to Dallas, I guess? We're not in the village itself but in the hills a mile and a half to the south-west. You can see our place from the Knockando road if you look across the Lossie to the other side of the glen when you're about a mile or so from Dallas.

The scenery in this part of the world isn't as rugged and spectacular as some of the west coast, but we certainly have no complaints about it