It's Another Yankee Forecast Today
One of our home landscaping projects is to recover an area overrun by bittersweet vine, and we’re going to try to establish a wildflower meadow. Following instructions from the seed vendor, we were told to track the soil temperature. Ecowitt sells the WN34S soil temp probe, and it was pretty simple to power it up and get it to display on our in-house monitors.
Thanks to Ken True of Saratoga-weather.org, an updated script to display river levels is in place. The NOAA has replaced a couple of older systems with inconsistent APIs and data formats with a new and improved system. Note that for the moment, you need to click to close the update message and the legend that take up half the display, but that should be temporary.
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Today, I added the World Weather Extremes page. A reminder to be grateful you’re not THERE!
Today marks three years since I started recording CoCoRaHS — Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow network — daily observations, missing only one day so far. Today was an observation of 11 inches of snow in the field, 5.7 on the snowboard, and water equivalents of 0.69″ on the board and 1.55″ in the field measurement. That’s a lot of water!
An update to the GW1100 firmware, version 2.3.1, enabled the gateway to “see” the WH32 (indoor temp, humidity and pressure) sensor instead of the built-in T&H sensors in the GW1100, and made that option the default. After the update, the calibration settings for the barometer appeared to change on their own, and the resulting reported barometric pressure was off. A quick search of the great posts on wxforum revealed this was a known issue and provided a fix: disable reading the newly-available WH32. Done!
Due to operator error (that’s me!), the weather page was wrong from around 730 pm EST last night until 6:20 am EST this morning. The site generator was inadvertently set to “Simulator” mode. We regret the error.
When reviewing my annual logs, I noticed the PM 2.5 detector, an Ecowitt WH41 model, dropped off in readings in August, and was pretty consistently low for the rest of the year. I visited the WxForum and found an article suggesting that the air chamber could be clogged and needed regular clearing. Sure enough, I took the device apart and found debris in side, and what might have been a thin leaf stem stuck in the fan. Cleaned and blown out, the device returned to service, readings immediately started to show more interesting behavior. Hope that fixes it!
After some study on the wxforum.net, and inspired by the now-retired weather station at contoocook.org, I made my first cautious weather station purchase on April 7th, 2021. I ordered an Ecowitt radio-to web gateway GW1000 and a WH31 Temperature and Humidity sensor.
My caution came from notes I had seen on the sometimes difficult task of getting the gateway to communicate with the home router, as it only communicated on the 2.4 MHz band. Worse, for that initial connection, you needed to use a phone app to connect to the gateway and supply it with credentials to connect to the network. What could go wrong? Well, lots, but it didn’t, at least for me. My concerns were unwarranted, as the connection went smoothly, and a new hobby was launched.
