Happy New Year!! Been busy with other things, so I haven't done much on the weather site. Things appear to be running along smoothly. This mid February the site will have been running for 4 years! Post a comment if you wish to let me know if you find the site useful. Originally the site was just for me to access when I was working in Sundre and had to drive back and forth. I then made it public as others where interested in live minute by minute weather. Over the 4 years I've had very few down times and have had over the last 2-3 years very accurate readings for my location.
I did a quick statistic the other day and found that this past December 2008 the coldest day hasn't been beaten since 1996 when the coldest day in December then was -38.0 Celsius. 1998 saw the coldest day at -31.5C and 2000 max coldest day was -29.5C.
Stay warm!

Replaced backup batteries with new Lithium batteries (good for the winter cold season) in anemometer and outside temperature/humidity sensor. Rather do that now when it is nice than to have to replace a battery in -20C with a wind chill!

The sun temperature sensor is normally a temperature only sensor on top of the pole, but FreeWX-Wi has problems with this sensor when the temperature dips below 0 Celsius. So for the winter I changed it to a temperature & humidity and placed it on the pole. This sensor doesn't catch as much sun light in the morning and evenings in the summer months.

Well, we'll see how long the station remains stable. I disabled Weather Underground about a year ago due to freeze up with the FreeWX-Wi software. Today I was viewing a fellow's weather web site and noticed a new feature from Weather Underground, the WebCam images. This new feature will store history images each day and place them into a nice calender view and as well, create a time lapse video for each day - WOW! This was something I was going to develop, but never had the time. So, check it out. From the weather site, click [Sky CAM] and then click the link below the web cam images. or click here http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/OldsAB/1/show.html.

I also re-enabled the weather data uploads, so the graphs and other data will start recording again. Since disabling Weather Underground, I've developed an application to watch FreeWX-Wi for failure and to fix it if the system freezes. So we'll see if that does the trick and how often it has to fix it.

The weather data is located here:
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstat ... IALBERTA44

A hailstorm blew in just after 7pm on July 13 and at about 7:20pm we lost power. At 7:45 or so I lost power to the Internet and network switches, about 5 minutes later the web server battery ran out. The weather station laptop stayed online. Just over an hour after the power went out, it was restored. The software running the weather station then had some issues reconnecting back to the network, so a reboot of the weather laptop was required. By 9pm all systems where running properly.
Looks like I'll need to get a bigger battery UPS to keep the web server up longer. I was surprised that the Internet and switches went down first as the battery backup is the same as the web server. The modem and switches must be drawing a lot of power!
A photo of the storm coming in can be viewed here:
Storm Photo
Cheers,
Jeff

The sun temperature sensor is normally a temperature only sensor on top of the pole, but FreeWX-Wi has problems with this sensor when the temperature dips below 0 Celsius. So for the winter I changed it to a temperature & humidity and placed it on the pole. This sensor doesn't catch as much sun light in the morning and evenings in the summer months.
Hope an update for FreeWX-Wi will come out and fix this, but there hasn't been one yet.

Finally got around to upgrading the main computer that the weather station runs on.
The 9 year old Toshiba Satellite laptop was upgraded to a 6 year old Sony Vaio. Oh the horsepower now! Not that the system needed it, but the whine of the hard drive was getting to be annoying. The Toshiba was up and running 24/7 since March 2005 - that is impressive! Just need to find an old 4GB 2.5" hard drive to replace the whiny one and the Toshiba will be ready for service. They don't make them like they use to. (Boy I sound old now.) The new Sony is now a year newer than the main web server which is 7 years old. Cheap stuff can still be useful!
Cheers - JZ

Updated front page to a CSS layout design. I'll continue to work on the rest of the site as time permits. If you have any problems viewing the pages, please let me know.
Thanks

If it is going to be windy in Olds, it is most likely to be coming from the North-North-West or South-South-East. When the Chinook's are blowing in, then the South-West.

The graph here is showing the percentage wind direction from March 2005 to March 2008.

These graphs show the average day temperature by year. Data is taken from March 2005 to February 2008. You can see when during the month it is the warmest or coldest.
Tip: click on the graph image to enlarge it.