This site was created to share my hobby with others who may find the data useful as well. This weather site also allows me to experiment with various programming techniques and weather logging experiments as well.

Weather Sensors

The conditions are measured with a Davis Vantage Pro 2 Plus which includes sensors following information. Wind speed and direction, temperature, air pressure, humidity, rain, solar radiation, & UV. The information is collected by the Davis console located inside, and sent to the in-house server which manages all aspects of the weather logging and processing. Davis offers several models of the Vantage Pro2, feel free to check out their site davisnet.com and see what all they offer if you are interested in setting up your own station.

The anemometer is located at the elevation of about 9' on a small telescopic pole. The ISS is located 3' above ground on the same post. Many of the instruments are concealed by the overhead trees and nearby buildings are not ideal for the accuracy of the readings, but is common in neighborhood environments.

Weather Server Hardware

The server that handles and processes all the weather data is a Supermicro X7DCL-I based platform. The data is sent from the sensors to the console via a low power radio. The console then sends the data to the server over a RS232 interface. All data is processed on the server using Weather-Display and the data is logged to the disk and archived. Weather-Display is also responsible for creating all the graphs and data displays that are on site. It is also responsible for uploading the data to this site as well.

The server has dual Intel Xeon L5420 quad processors running at 2.5GHz and 8GB ECC RAM giving 8 cores of usable CPU power. There are two 320Gb SATA Enterprise grade drives in a RAID 1 array that helps overcome a single drive failure. The machine runs a locked down Windows 2003 Server install. The networking equipment as well as the server are on a UPS so they can continue working during a short-term power outage. UPS run time is approximately 20 minutes. The server is connected to a HP Procurve 2810-24G 1gb managed switch. Internet service is provided by Time Warner Cable.

This actual website is hosted on an Octa (8) processor Xeon server running Linux located in a data center in Dallas, Texas. Other specifics about the server are not known as its a leased machine which we don't own or have full access to. Our server sends data to this server.

The software that runs this site was written by MGCJerry originally for use in another system but has outgrown the original system and now functions on its own. The software has been called "MGCMS" and the current version is "0.9b". This software is still under development and is not available for download or purchase at this time.

Software in use on the Weather Server is:
Weather Display, Weather Display Live, Nexstorm, NSLog and server software is Apache 2, PHP 5, MariaDB 10, Perl & Windows Server 2003.

All other trademarks mentioned are properties of their respective owners, and they are not paid endorsements m'kay.