What is Woking Weather?
Woking Weather is a website driven by an automatic weather station mounted in the rear garden (rain, temperature, humidty, solar and UV sensors) and on the gable end (wind sensor) of a house in Knaphill, a suburb of Woking in Surrey, UK.
The weather station records temperature, humidity, wind speed & direction, rainfall, rain rate, solar & ultra violet, and barometic pressure. It calculates cloud cover, altitude of cloud base, wind chill, heat index, evapotrasperation, dewpoint, moon phase, sun rise and sun set.
The weather station sends it data to this web server several times per minute
Why
The owner of Woking Weather has always had an interest in meterology and wanted to see how the conditions in Woking varied to that of the forecasts by the Met Office and the BBC. He was also keen to observe trends, e.g. typical rainfal, temperature, wind direction, humidity, solar & UV radiation for each month. How these varied year on year. What was the hottest day and what temperature did it achieve.
History
June 2007: Weather station installed
July 2007: Website went online in
April 2008: Started sending data to WeatherUnderground at 5 minute intervals.
July 2008: a Solar sensor was installed.
August 2009: a UV sensor was installed.
January 2010: a webcam was installed to show realtime images of the sky. WeatherUnderground was updated to take the webcam images and produce 24-hour time-lapse videos every day. NOTE: this has since been decomissioned.
July 2010: Started sending data to the Citizen Weather Observer Program, PWS Weather, and Twitter. Another view of the CWOP data can be found here .
August 2010: Dedicated website setup at www.wokingweather.co.uk
November 2011: Station moved as the owner moved house ~1m West. Still located within Knaphill, but the new site is slightly less affected by surrounding trees.
Equipment
The weather station is a Davis Vantage Pro 2 wireless model with Davis Solar and UV radiation sensors. A Davis WeatherLink IP data logger is installed in the console. WeatherDisplay32 runs on a PC and retrieves the data at 2.5s intervals from the data logger over the network and writes the data to a local logfiles.
The Vantage Pro 2 and Daytime Fan Kit were purchased from Weather Shop in East Sussex, who have been extremely helpful and can’t be recommended more.
About Woking
See the wikipedia page on Woking, and the local community website, The Knaphillian for current happenings.