Weather Station Installed!

My dad and grandma came up to my house today to help me put up my weather station. It went up pretty easy. We decided to place it near the back of my property near the center (to keep it from being too close to the neighbors' yards)...this placement maximizes the reception of easterly winds while keeping the anemometer low enough to be easily accessed and hidden from the street.

I decided to use a treated 4x4 although I placed it at the edge of the property. Compared to pipe, it's more rigid, cheaper, and looks more natural. Overall, I'm very happy with the placement and look of the station.

As always, you can click on the photos below to view them in high resolution.


The outdoor sensors. On the left, the white box is the solar panels and wireless transmitter, the black cylinder is the rain gauge, and the white piece hanging below the rain gauge is the thermometer/hygrometer. On the right is, of course, the anemometer.



The display console is placed next to the patio door, near my living room chair for easy viewing. Not the prettiest thing hanging on my walls, but definitely the coolest!


The next step is to install the computer hardware and software, and start recording data to both my hard drive and the internet. I kind of dread doing this because I have a tendency to break stuff on the computer when I install new hardware. Regardless, I'll probably get started on this tonight. I'll post links to my data when it's up on the net.

UPDATE:

So far the station is working very well. I'm happy with how well I'm receiving the northeast wind. I'm going to hold off on setting up the "online edition" until at least tomorrow, because I have erroneous data from today...the barometer was initially not taking my elevation above sea level into account, so it spent the entire afternoon correcting itself. I don't want to publish that I was reporting an erroneous 990mb pressure earlier today, so I'll wait until I have at least a full day's worth of quality data.