March & April: I have made a few changes during March and April to add some additional information to the weather graphs. Prompted by a notice in the local newspaper intimating that the resident weather man was retiring from his weather data collecting duties I decided to try and rewrite my VBA code to extract similar information from my data. This done, I found that the way I have coded the routines is upset by any missing samples. To fix this I have had to fill in the gaps, which I have done by duplicating the last good data. Not ideal but it allows the graphs to be drawn properly and the correct maxima and minima to be found.
Further, while trying to get the wireless external sensors to reconnect I managed to perform a "Factory Reset" on the console. It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realised this had set the recording interval to five minutes instead of the one minute I was expecting. Again, I have duplicated good data to make up the sample numbers.
May: In order to try and eliminate the missing samples I have purchased a 30m cat5 Ethernet cable and connected the sensor unit directly to the display unit. This is quite a bit longer than LaCrosse say you can use but unlike the LaCrosse supplied cable, which is simply a flat telephone cable, an Ethernet cable is made up of twisted pairs and while modifying it to put the required telephone type connectors in place of the Ethernet ones I also doubled up the pairs of wires to increase the conductor area. So far it seems to have been working fine since I installed it on May the 10th. When I am satisfied that it is okay the cable will be installed properly instead of trailing across and down the wall and squeezing in past the side of a garage door and generally looking rather untidy. I also hope that it will be long enough!
June: Had a problem with the signal from the DCF clock this month. Looking at the console in the evening of the 28th it was showing a time of around 3:30 am on the 29th and the symbol for the DCF connection was missing. Reset the time manually and reset the history file to try to record the data for the present which was being ignored as the console thought it had already collected it. Examining the data it seems that the clock problem had occurred at 3:02 on the 28th when the time skipped to 13:03. I have modified the dates in the data to reflect this.
October: This month has been a bit of a disaster! Teach me to go away on holiday! It seems that there was a problem with the PC collecting the data from the weather station. It was working fine until the day I left and then it managed to break. It is a Windows 98 machine and when I powered it up to see what was wrong I saw the usual patronising Win 98 "Windows was not shut down properly ... " message which it had got stuck at. The result is that all data between about 7pm on the 10th and 12:00 on the 25th was lost. To fill the gap left I have interpolated between the recorded values or else set them to zero depending on the parameters being measured. Having done this, I then found a couple of unexplained gaps on the 7th and 27th.
November: All is well!
December: It rarely snows much in December here but this year on the 17th it began to fall and has continued to fall off and on for most of the following week. Writing this on the 23rd there has been no recorded rainfall since the 21st. There are in fact about nine inches of snow covering the ground. Also, there appears to have been no wind since 17:38 on the 21st. It has been fairly calm during this time but I believe that the anemometer has been covered in snow which has frozen and stopped it thus accounting for this anomaly.
The temperature has barely risen above freezing since the 17th - it fell below 0C at about 18:00 that day, reached 0C at 11:44, peaked at 1.7C and had fallen back below 0C by 14:48 on the 19th.
On the 20th it didn't reach 0C until 12:41 and then it hovered between -0.4C and +0.5C for the rest of the day.
The 21st saw a peak of 2.0C during the three hours or so around lunch time when the temperature rose above 1C.
The daytime peak for the 22nd was 0C with a short excursion up to +0.2 in the early evening.
Overnight saw a low of -4.5C followed by a daytime high for the 23rd of -0.2C during the hour and a half when it was above -1C and by 16:00 -5C was being recorded. At 21:40 it had dropped to -10C.
27th - the snow has began to melt during a short lived thaw, resulting in some very generous hourly rainfall figures!
The total "rainfall" recorded for the day was 32mm before the frost returned and continued until the end of the month and beyond along with more snow fall.
In Summary, most of the month has been quite cold (for here!) with the average temperature being 0.15C.
A closer look, however, reveals that up to the 10th the average was 4.0C, from the 10th to 14th approximately 0C, which brought the average to the 17th down to 2.4C and then from the 17th on it was slightly less than -2.3C on average.