http://twitter.com/otteryweather

New This Month

Fitzroy Stormglass purchased from weather in a bottle

Welcome to the Ottery St Mary Weather Station, which is located near the centre of the town giving 24 hour weather updates from the station, and hosted on a server located in Ottery itself.

The Station is based on the Davis Weather Monitor II console and instruments. These are located on the antenna mast in the garden, in the best sensor locations available at the site. The Davis console is then routed through a WeatherLink II Datalogger, and into an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, Ubuntu Linux based VMware Server.

The virtualised weather server is running Apache2, PHP5 and mysql5 as well as Weather-Display and WeatherDisplayLive. The station is backed up with a UPS and battery backup for the Console. The data logger also has memory for 30 days of weather data in the event of software failure / hardware outage. Weather Data is backed up externally to a Flash Drive in case of server crash.

As the station has been operational since 2006, Long term trending of weather data is available. This archive is kept in a mysql database, with a record being committed every 10 mins. This data is used for the 24 Hour graphs seen on the site. The Custom Graph facility provides the on-line review of any of the recorded weather data since the start of the station in April 2006.

Supplementary Sensors based on 1-wire technology are used for Soil Temp's, Solar Intensity, Leaf Wetness and Lightning. These are used with the WD software and data added to the mysql databse for further processing and display.

The whole weather station consumes 64 watts of electricity over an hour, and has been designed to eventually be run from sustainable energy.

The station was installed in March 2006 and data is available via this website, fed from the local sensors and METAR data from EGTE (Exeter Airport) which is approx. 4 miles away from this location.

The weather software running the website is weatherdisplay and WeatherDisplayLive which are configured to maintain the data and display it efficiently. These products are available from the UKWeathershop. The website CMS is Joomla, and is used to maintain the content of the site. Phoca add-on's are added to provide extra functionality. Other software used such as the dynamic graphing code using jpgraph has been written by the author, which is available on request.

The Forecast functionality, which uses WXSIM, a local atmospheric modeling application provides accurate weather forecasting for the local area (-/+ 10 Miles). This software processes weather input from multiple sources and uses locally recorded data from the weather station database.

The Accuracy of this software is continually being compared with the actual weather and is available from this site.

This information is provided for information only, and is not designed to be an official source of meteorological data. Please do not make life dependent decisions based on this data.