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SLOweather server upgraded

Saturday, November 19th, 2005

You may have noticed that some of the SLOweather pages were not updating for a while on Saturday afternoon.

We were replacing the old 500 mhz Windows 2000 Pro weather computer with a brand new 3.0 ghz Gateway XP Media Center PC. It took a while to move the lightning detector PCI card, install all of the programs, and move the old data and archive files.

Then it took a little more time to get all of the programs talking with their respective hardware, and then get them to send the files up to the SLOweather website. If you notice that any part of SLOweather isn’t updating, please let us know using this link.

With a bigger, faster computer, we’ll be able to add more features to SLOweather in the future. Size does matter…

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Camera Maintenance

Saturday, August 27th, 2005

I went to the hilltop today and cleaned the spider webs off the fronts of the downtown and airport camera enclosures. The views are much clearer now.

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StrikeStar lightning

Friday, July 29th, 2005

The SLOWeather lightning tracker is now a part of the StrikeStar lightning triangulation network. You can see the maps for the US on the StrikeStar website.

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StormVue on line

Thursday, July 28th, 2005

StormVue is Astrogenic’s Java interface to their NexStorm software, and lets you, the site viewer get minute by minute updates of lightning activity, control the zoom level, and even time-loop the display. The SLOWeather StormVue is now on-line here.

Try it out, if you like. And as always, feedback is welcome.

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Lightning page now has a map

Wednesday, July 27th, 2005

If you’ve checked the lightning tracker since mid afternoon Wednesday, you’ve seen the map arrived and is on-line. It looks like the tracker is working pretty well. There was a cell near Daggett shown on the Intellicast radar in about the same location as the tracker was showing a lot of strikes. The software even put up a circle indicating a storm for a few minutes.

I’m amazed at how well a single antenna lightning tracker can work. The commercial sites like USPLN and Vaisala use multiple detectors to triagulate lightning strikes.

There is at least one private initiative to tringulate lightning strike data over the Internet. More on that later.

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SLOWeather Lightning page back!

Tuesday, July 26th, 2005

After an absence of almost a year, the SLOWeather lightning tracker is back on line with a new Boltek PCI card, and a new version of the Astrogenic NexStorm software.

Both were purchased from Ambient, makers of the Virtual Weather Station programthat creates the graphics for the weather pages.

I have the range cranked up and the squelch cranked down to show almost anything the antenna hears. The update period is also very short, while the strike persistency is set to 3 hours so I don’t have to check it that often.

We’re also waiting on delevery of the background maps, so all the display shows right now are range rings and azimuth lines.

As soon as we get a verifiable storm I’ll be checking the antenna orientation for accuracy, too.

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SLOWeather and APRS

Sunday, July 17th, 2005

APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) is an amateur radio service that was developed to use GPSes and packet radio to transmit an amateur station’s position. Other stations listening on the frequency could then receive the data and plot it on a computer map.

APRS has been expanded to include other data including weather, and Internet gateway stations receive APRS data off the air and put it on the Internet where anyone with a computer can receive it.

I port my SLOWeather data on to APRS as well as to the SLOWeather web page. You can see one interpretation of it here.

The National Weather Service, among others, uses this data regularly.

There are more than 20 other APRS stations within 110 miles of SLOWeather also reporting their conditions via APRS.

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