Weather Station 1st Year
09/05/2006 ( Weather, )A year ago – May 6th 2005 – we installed a Davis Vantage Pro 2 Plus weather station at Crieffvechter, on the western extent of the farm, one mile east of Crieff. Its a well worn cliche that the British like nothing more than to talk about the weather; perhaps even more apposite is the ability of those in the farming industry to be slightly less than satisfied with how it is affecting them… What better opportunity than to install the equipment to back up our unhappiness with hard data!
Added to this, with the current media interest in all things related to “global warming”, was the opportunity to see whether our impressions of unpredictable seasons, warmer winters etc were true. As a long term tool, we might be able to separate some fact from fiction. So the combination of my own curiosity and a somewhat tenuous farming “need” was enough to get me researching the best option. We wanted a solution that would allow the analysis of as much data as possible, and ideally the ability to share that data at any time during the day, across at least two different sites of work.
This seemed to mean a PC linked solution, although any ambitions to put the data on a website were not even known to be possible at this stage, let alone within our capabilities. A phone call to ProData Weather Systems managed to hit the bullseye at the first attempt. Patient and expert advise covered the possibilities and options available. The Davis Vantage Pro seemed to be the industry standard, with all the abilities we would need. We specified the “Plus” version, including Solar and UV sensors to add to the standard temperature, wind, humidity and rain. We omitted the optional fan-aspirated radiation shield, wanting to avoid the certainty of guaranteed global cooling in Crieff…. Cabled and Wireless versions were available; the freedom to site the station wherever we wanted and the lack of any likely interference meant the wireless version was for us.
It’s worth noting that leaf and soil sensors are also available, but as we are mainly Beef and Cereal producers, we felt the added readings might simply be overkill. At the same time we ordered the Windows PC Serial Davis Weatherlink Software . This added a data logger with serial cable to connect to a Windows machine that would run alonside the Vantage Pro Console and give us the ability to analyse data in greater detail. More importantly it would give us the ability to very easily upload the data to the web – although we didn’t really appreciate that at the time.
A week later the slightly daunting package arrived and for once I made sure I read and reread the instructions. A sign of ProData’s excellence was the inclusion of their own instructions giving extra advise on setup and installation. The first decision was where to site the station, most importantly, where to site the anenometer. The recommended location is as high as possible, most likely above roof height. But given that we would probably use the wind readings to guage spraying conditions, a location nearer boom height was felt to be more useful; a height of 2 metres on a steel aerial tube was the prefered choice. The final location placed the station on the most solid fence strainer in front of Crieffvechter, about 20 metres away from the desk where the console would sit and the PC.
Taking due care, setup, installation and calibration was very straightforward and before I knew it the Console was displaying readings and we were exploring the depths of the Weatherlink software and realising that with the built in ftp software and web templates, the easiest way to share the data was going to be over the internet. This wouldn’t allow detailed graphing, but would allow access from anywhere to the latest readings. With the use of webspace already included in our broadband package we soon had the Crieffvechter Website up and running. The slippery slope of weather obsession had started to take hold.
A year on and we are extremely happy with the setup – as are a few of our neighbours! (must remember to ask for donations…) The only glitch has been a brief few hours where the anenometer stopped working – again ProData were excellent with advise over the phone and it was soon working well again. The Weatherlink software has the annoying habit of hanging infrequently, but data is not lost, just delayed – as an Apple convert, I of course blame Windows. The data is also uploaded to the Weather Underground and of course now uploaded in a slightly more elegant fashion to here as well.
As for the first year – well have a look yourself – its all there and has given us a good baseline to compare what is thrown at us in the next few years – Global Warming…..? We’ll see.
