Weather Station

The Earlham College Weather Station initiative is to provide data as a reference to be used against the energy usage of the campus. This information is useful in many situations including future development of the EC Comprehensive Sustainability Plan and the Energy Wars competition. The weather station initiative here at Earlham College uses a Davis Vantage Pro 2 Plus system. This system is designed to collect readings of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and UV radiation (among others) and transport that data to the display monitor via cable. The cabled version was chosen for its stability and reliability, The weather station is on the north end of campus on the roof of Dennis Hall.

All of the information generated by the weather station is sent to a display monitor located in the CS batcave on the fourth floor of Dennis Hall. The display monitor shows the current readings from the station and sends the information to our machine new-proto using an ethernet cable. We utilize the WeeWX program to move the information from the display monitor to the PostgreSQL database on out new-proto machine.

The data that is generated by the weather station ends up in a PostgreSQL database on our dedicated computer science machine new-proto.cs.earlham.edu. This database is a holding space to store and access our data. It will serve as the source of information for a webpage that will display the data. This webpage is intended to be a portal to connect the students on campus with the direct results of computer science at work.

The weather station is a Vantage Pro2 Plus with Standard Radiation Shield. Ours is the cabled version, not the wireless version. The cable was chosen for greater stability and dependability. It will be installed on the roof of Dennis during the 2014 spring semester.

All documents are courtesy of Davis Instruments.

PDF Documents

console

hardware configuration using ISS (Integrated Sensor Suite)

specs

WeatherLink (Data Logger, USB version - ignore Windows software descriptions):

Source Links

Cabled Vantage Pro2 Plus with Standard Radiation Shield

index for manufacturer documentation

Notes

• The console collects the data and relays that data to other devices.
• A maximum of 2560 records can be archived. Individual records are 52 bytes in size and the device has 128K of non-volatile memory. This is the data used by dataloggers.

Use the following command to find the weewx daemon:

• find / -name "*weewx*" | grep weewxd

use this to configure storing archived data to a psql database