| Hardware: | Vantage Pro2 | Hardware Addon: | Solar Radiation Sensor |
| Hardware Addon: | Lightning Detector |
| WeeWX version: | 4.5.1 |
| Belchertown skin version: | 1.3b2+ |
| System uptime: | 45 days, 9 hours, 43 minutes |
| WeeWX uptime: | 1 day, 1 hour, 49 minutes |
| Vantage Pro2 console battery: | 4.7 V |
| Vantage Pro2 ISS battery: | OK |
| Lightning detector battery: | OK |
Technique used to display the homepage observations
When the homepage is loaded or refreshed, it initially displays observations from the latest 5 minute
archive interval. When the Connected to weather station live. Data received...
message is displayed
(with time updating), observations are displayed in real-time.
So how does this real-time display work? The weather station computer publishes observations to a remote cloud server. Your browser subscribes to this cloud server to receive these observations:
- Wind and Rain observations are published every 2.5 seconds.
- Lightning observations are published every 8 seconds (when lightning in area) or 24 seconds.
- Other observations are published every 12.5 seconds.
The Weather Records and Graphs are updated every 5 minutes.
Weather station information
Weather observations are from a Davis Vantage Pro2 with 24 hour fan aspirated radiation shield personal weather station located in the River Ridge 3 Subdivision, Georgetown, TX (USA). The Vantage Pro2 has a Davis Solar Radiation Sensor connected to it. Weather data are received in real-time by the Vantage Pro2 console.
There is a Davis WeatherLink USB Data Logger that sends the console data to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ computer running the WeeWX weather software. This weather computer provides the website feeds.
For lightning detection an AcuRite 06045M is used with a RTL-SDR USB dongle. The RTL-SDR receives the signal from the lightning detector and connects to the weather computer.
The Davis Vantage Pro2 and AcuRite 06045M provide the following observations:
- Wind speed
- Wind direction
- Wind Gust
- Rainfall
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Solar radiation
- Barometric Pressure
- Lightning strikes and storm distance
The rest of the observations on this website are done via software calculations and quality control checks to make sure the data are valid.
The above weather observations (except for lightning) are posted to the following websites:
- Weather station KTXGEORG4 at the Weather Underground
- Weather station CW3077 at the Citizens Weather Observer Program (CWOP)
These data are sent to NOAA MADIS for quality checks then distributed to many users including the NWS Weather Forecast Offices. You can see quality checks at MesoWest C3077. - Weather station CW3077 at the PWS Weather site
Hosting services used:
- Inmotion Hosting providing a Shared Hosting server that hosts the rr3weather.com website
- Kamatera Performance Cloud providing a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting the MQTT message broker software that provides the real-time updates
Software used:
- WeeWX weather station software
- HighCharts for the various charts on the website
- The Belchertown skin theme built for WeeWX
- Eclipse Mosquitto MQTT is a message broker for the real-time updates published by the weather station computer and subscribed to when your browser loads or refreshes the homepage.
Credits:
- Thanks to Pat at BelchertownWeather.com for this amazing website for WeeWX!
- Weather radar from Windy
- Forecast data from AerisWeather API
- Earthquake data from USGS.gov Earthquake Catalog Developer API