Let's Talk About the Weather

What does the wind flowing over the U.S. look like?

scott — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 22:06:47 +0000

I heard or read about this story somewhere about a couple Google Computer Scientists who created a map of the wind as it flows over the United States. The website is at hint.fm/wind the map is absolutely amazing, and hypnotic to watch. Hope you enjoy.

Weather Condition Icons

scott — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:43:13 +0000

As part of the multiple changes I have planned, a weather condition icon has been added to the upper right hand corner of the page to indicate the current weather conditions. Sunny, partly cloudy, cloudy, etc. I just notice that I forgot to make the rain icons live. We’ve been in a drought ya know and I’ve only got so much free time. Guess those are next on my list, since we’ve got almost an inch of rain today!

The Blog is Back!

scott — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:40:03 +0000

After a short hiatus the Benbrook Weather Blog is back online. It took me a while to get my website configuration sorted out. heh oh well, we’re back to normal.

New Theme & Mobile site Live

WPAdmin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:10:41 +0000

As announced last week, the site has a new Theme! Additionally, for iPhone visitors you’ll see a mobile formatted version of the site. Hopefully in the near future, I’ll have support for other mobile devices. Drop me a comment if there is a feature you’d like to see added.

Some minor site changes Live today

scott — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:20:05 +0000

Just wanted to announce a few changes that went live today.

The most major change is I’ve implemented AJAX and JQuery to automatically update the weather readings every minute! No more 15 minute refresh! Woohoo!
I’ve updated a couple of the graphics on the website. Some of the images were grainy and needed some touch-up.

These are the start of a series of major changes that will be coming in 2012. Some upcoming notable changes include a new theme, and a Mobile website!

2011 Weather in Review

WPAdmin — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:15:36 +0000

Below is a month-to-month summary of 2011 weather.

Month	Temperature			Humidity			Rain	Wind
Month	Low	Mean	High	Low	Mean	High	Rain	Avg.	High	Dom. Dir.
January	16.7°	41.4°	76.3°	10%	59.1%	91%	0.02 in.	2.0 mph	25 mph	E (96°)
February	11.8°	47.7°	82.8°	2%	59.5%	89%	0.02 in.	4.2 mph	36 mph	ESE (120°)
March	26.6°	60.2°	87.5°	5%	53.5%	91%	0.01 in.	6.9 mph	40 mph	SSE (149°)
April	33.9°	69.8°	94.8°	3%	52.9%	89%	0.14 in.	8.1 mph	45 mph	SSE (154°)
May	37.8°	71.6°	97.9°	13%	60.5%	89%	0.11 in.	7.4 mph	55 mph	SSE (154°)
June	66.3°	85.9°	104.0°	14%	46.3%	87%	0.05 in.	5.7 mph	36 mph	ESE (118°)
July	72.5°	90.6°	107.9°	14%	40.7%	75%	0.00 in.	3.9 mph	25 mph	SE (142°)
August	73.8°	92.7°	112.3°	12%	40.7%	91%	0.06 in.	3.0 mph	33 mph	ESE (120°)
September	53.4°	79.4°	107.3°	10%	44.1%	89%	0.06 in.	3.9 mph	41 mph	E (98°)
October	35.8°	67.5°	90.4°	11%	59.0%	93%	0.10 in.	4.6 mph	37 mph	ESE (116°)
November	27.2°	58.4°	85.7°	15%	61.7%	92%	0.05 in.	6.1 mph	40 mph	SE (146°)
December	22.5°	48.2°	79.2°	20%	69.7%	93%	0.06 in.	4.8 mph	34 mph	ESE (115°)

New Camera

WPAdmin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:17:43 +0000

After many years of service I’ve decided to replace my aging Axis 2100 camera with a TP-Link TL-SC3171. I’ve also started a project to relocate my camera. The trees in the back yard have gotten pretty big and have taken most of the shot. So I’m in the process of mounting the camera outdoors in a Lorex SG630 case.

2010 Weather in Review

WPAdmin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:14:52 +0000

Below is a month-to-month summary of 2010 weather.

Month	Temperature			Humidity			Rain	Wind
Month	Low	Mean	High	Low	Mean	High	Rain	Avg.	High	Dom. Dir.
January	10.2°	43.8°	75.7°	23%	72%	100%	1.99 in.	4.7 mph	30.0 mph	SSW (209°)
February	22.3°	41.1°	71.2°	21%	76%	100%	0.85 in.	4.7 mph	33.0 mph	SSW (203°)
March	29.2°	53.6°	85.3°	14%	65%	100%	0.74 in.	6.7 mph	33.0 mph	SW (215°)
April	37.4°	64.2°	83.2°	16%	69%	100%	0.67 in.	6.9 mph	36.0 mph	S (191°)
May	46.3°	74.5°	96.9°	23%	64%	99%	0.40 in.	5.4 mph	40.0 mph	SE (128°)
June	65.6°	82.8°	100.2°	23%	50%	89%	0.06 in.	6.1 mph	33.0 mph	SSE (147°)
July	69.9°	83.4°	102.7°	15%	63%	90%	0.05 in.	4.5 mph	32.0 mph	SE (142°)
August	59.2°	86.5°	107.1°	11%	51%	87%	0.08 in.	3.5 mph	31.0 mph	SE (142°)
September	48.5°	77.0°	97.1°	15%	65%	89%	0.08 in.	4.2 mph	40.0 mph	SE (133°)
October	43.4°	64.8°	85.9°	12%	56%	88%	0.01 in.	2.3 mph	24.0 mph	ESE (116°)
November	25.6°	55.4°	82.1°	9%	58%	90%	0.04 in.	6.1 mph	36.0 mph	S (177°)
December	22.0°	47.4°	84.8°	6%	53%	89%	0.02 in.	5.5 mph	33.0 mph	SSE (150°)

Server Crashed, We’re Back Online

scott — Thu, 13 May 2010 10:06:40 +0000

On May 3, 2010 I upgraded to the latest version of Virtual Weather Station. This turned out to be a BIG mistake. For those familiar with my Nuts & Bolts post the Weather Station is connected to the computer via a USB cable and some Serial Port emulation software. One of the feature changes of the most recent Virtual Weather Station (v14.01) is the ability to use USB connection directly. Long story, short, whatever they changed caused the software to stop working with an error “Could not connect to communications device”. After several days of trying to fix this, I decided to bite the bullet and convert my software suite to wview which runs on Linux.

The move to wview has several benefits for me. #1 I no longer need to license Windows for my weather station. #2 I don’t have to run a virtual machine on my server to run the weather station. #3 did I mention I hate Windows?

So, a quick status update about the site. Most of the graphs and graphics have been taken off because they were being generated by Virtual Weather Station. For now most of the vital information is being populated on the website. Over the coming months I will be working to create replacement graphs and graphics. toward the end my hope is to publish the software under GNU v2. So other weather station operators can setup a station, on Linux, and make use of the programs I use (in conjunction with wview).

So, why not use the htmlgend that’s provided in wview? I tried, however the software kept crashing and caused the whole wview software to hang. Data wasn’t collected and IPC’s were getting crammed with garbage messages. I had a look at htmlgend’s code, when I got to the comment that read.

“This is by far the ugliest code in the wview source. Shortcuts are taken to optimize image and HTML generation.”

I lost interest in attempting to debug and/or improve upon htmlgend for the following reasons. #1 My needs are different, I have a lot of summary, statistics, and data collation that I want my web page to show. For example the 10 minute wind average, the current, high, and low charts, and the Weather Summary grid. These are fairly data intensive and I felt my existing database structure was better equipped to handle them. My vision is to combine some of what Virtual Weather Station used to give me with some of the charts that Weather Underground creates.

Record Snowfall!

scott — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:48:14 +0000

The snow started falling before dawn on February 11, 2010 and it didn’t stop until the following morning. When it was finished the Dallas Fort Worth area received a record amount, 12.5 inches of snow. Below are a few images I captured from this momentous event.

Snow clinging onto branches of a tree.

Snow clinging to the branches of a Bradford Pear tree.

Snow on a wrought iron fence and trees.

Snow on tree branches

Finally, I’ll conclude this post with three web cam videos chronicling the snowfall on February 11th and 12th, and the melt on the 13th.

Snowfall on Thursday, February 11, 2010

Starting to melt on Friday, February 12, 2010

More melting on Saturady, February 13, 2010