Historical data missing - FIXED

William O’Connell noticed that the historical data for the months of April 2011 and October 2004 were missing. (Well, they contained duplicate copies of May and Nov respectively.)  This has now been fixed!  Thanks William for pointing this out to me!

26th August-14th September 2012

Rain readings are low for this period due to a blockage in the funnel that feeds the automatic rain gauge.  I fixed this on return from a trip away.  Thanks to Peter Marshall for pointing out the oddly dry weather the West End Weather Station was reporting while he was experiencing a downpour about half a mile away!

Oh!  I have updated the monthly historical data for 2012 through to 13th October.

21st January 2012

OK, so I thought I would be clever and make these pages also report monthly and three monthly trends.  Unfortunately, in doing this I managed to get my IP banned again by the ISP (16:30 on 21st Jan).  I’m hoping 1and1 will fix it faster this time.

Yup!  They fixed it sometime early on Monday (23rd Jan)  morning!

15th January 2012

Oh dear! And things were going so well too!  The software that uploads weather data to this website got confused about the password today and made multiple failed attempts to login.  Unfortunately, this led to the ISP 1and1.co.uk to blacklist the IP address of my home network.  Despite being promised by 1and1 that they would reinstate the IP address within four hours it still hasn’t happened after more than 10 hours and they claim they can’t tell me how long it will take.

In the meantime, I have a workaround that may work at least to get this page visible.  Hopefully the weather data will start appearing as it should when 1and1 get their act together.

Update:  they got it working again 60 hours after it first broke and 30 hours after I first reported it.

14th January 2012

Happy New Year! 

The annoying problem with data appearing to be an hour behind has been fixed.  I’ve also updated the software that uploads to the website, so hopefully this will be more stable than the version I was using.

There are still intermittent problems with the UV sensor giving values when it is dark...

The historical data has been updated to include 2011!

1st June 2011 - 4th June 2011
1800 degrees C temp reading and almost nothing else...

Oh dear!  This really is not a good year for the weather station.  As the temperature climbed at the beginning of June the weather station failed completely and did not capture the unusually high temperature on the 3rd (maybe 26 degrees?)  I thought at first the backup battery had failed, but replacing that made no difference.  Then I noticed that the aerial (bit of wire)  for the station was missing!  A bit of rooting around in the flower bed below the weather station found the aerial.  Eight years of Scottish weather had corroded it off the circuit board.   Fortunately, it was an easy fix with a soldering iron and all seems well again, but sadly, since the data logger is at the other end of the wireless link, no data were recorded from about 12 noon on Wednesday 1st June untill 12 noon on Saturday 4th.  I think that is the longest unrecoverable outage we have had in 8 years, so probably not bad...  Ho hum...

7th Feb 2011 - 26th Feb 2011
Bizarre UV readings...

The UV readings went crazy this month with unseasonably high values and mysterious, non-zero readings in the middle of the night!  Various explanations were put forward by people who noticed this phenomenon:  glow worms sitting on the sensor, covert military operations in the upper atmosphere, sunspots (?), prelude to the End of the World as in the movie 2012 (OK that was superfast neutrinos..), or that the readings suggested the first stage of an  alien invasion!  We were relieved to find that cleaning the UV sensor seemed to fix the problem,  though it would have been nice to see those glow-worms!

Jan-August 2007
Mysterious shift in wind direction...

With climate change big on our minds, when we noticed a  concerted shift in the prevailing wind direction from West to North in 2007 we naturally started to fear the worst.  Was this the beginning of a radical change to the Scottish climate? The beginning of a time of deep, cold winters (mmm. maybe?) Perhaps this change was heralding the end of civilization as we know it?

Well, it turned out that there was a fault in the cable that links the wind-direction vane with the main weather station. If the weather station fails to get a signal from the wind-vane it defaults to North. The fault was intermittent, so over time, this looked like a concerted shift in wind direction...  Fixing the cable made the  readings go back to normal. Of course this took a while to figure out and some more time to dig up the lawn and replace the cable, so unfortunately, a big chunk of 2007 now has wind direction records that are junk.