Weather Station

Starlight Cascade in Eastern Ontario Canada near Yarker, about 25 minutes northwest of Kingston, Ontario in the Township of Stone Mills
44.22.39 North Latitude 76.45.47 West Longitutde 155M Elevation
Page Created 2003 May 05
Page Last Updated: 2006 December 26

A new Weather Station for Christmas! What more could one ask for? An Oregon WMR968 weather station arrived on Christmas Day and was set up just a few hours later. It has wireless data capability so the base station has moved from the observatory and into the house. Remote units cover the greenhouse and the garage. Wooohoo!

manual (1mb PDF)

Our weather underground station ID is IOntario51 which is located near Yarker Ontario in Eastern Ontario (44.4 deg North, 76.8 deg West, 144 metres up) and you can see our data at http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=IONTARIO51.

FreeWX-wi v1.01 also autogenerates three web pages and automatically uploads them to this site: freewx.htm * freewx1.htm * freewxsummary.html

This weather station does not detect lightning strikes, although we are looking into adding sensors for that.
You can find a lightning detection station here, based out of Fergus Ontario.
Kingston is over 400km away from the station and the web page says that it only works well out to 300km?

Eastern Ontario Road Conditions

Historical (before 2006 December 25)

We have a Radio Shack branded WX-200 wired weather station. It provided good weather data (temperature, humidity, pressure, dew point, wind speed and direction, and rainfall rate) for some time... Then we discovered FreeWX a great free software package that graphs the data on the host computer, stores data, transmits data to other freewx clients on the network, and can also upload the data to central data gathering points, in this case, the Weather Underground

Computer Hardware: The weather station is running on:

an old workstation running a P3-800 MHz and 256 Mb RAM

100 Mbps network link using a SMC 1211TX PCI card

video: PCI

20 gb hard drive

OS: MS Windows NT 2000 Pro

freewx v2.03 build 290304 released 2004 March 29th

Weather Station History

2006 July 17 - a Microsoft OS update last week caused a reboot of the observatory workstation running the weather station software plus, when it came back up, the com1 port was unavailable. So the weather station is offline until we can troubleshoot this latest MS &@)#$^)^. Needless to say, MS Automatic OS updates have been disabled.

2006 June 03 - reinstalled in the Starlight Cascade Observatory outdoors. Replaced corroded connections. Wind speed/direction is now mounted on the allsky post about 2.5m off the ground, the temperature/humidity probe is on the northwest side of the observatory wall, shielded from the sun and the rain gauge is on the end of the roll off roof track. Freewx software set to upload every 30 minutes.

2006 February 01 - removed / dismantled the station. More bad electrical signal connections due to corrosion and no temperature readings for some weeks now. Will try to fix and relocated with shorter cables outdoors.

2005 October 19 - throughout the summer of 2005 we suffered from intermittent temperature/humidity sensor dropout. Looks like it may be time to look for a new weather station system.

2004 June 21 - moved the temp/humid/pressure sensor again, off the tower mast at 1 m above ground to a shaded spot under a tree near the deck, about 3/4 m off the ground. We found that in the Old Location, the side of the house reflected and trapped a lot of heat all morning long, resulting in false high readings until the sun no longer hit the eastern house wall.

old Location

2004 April 05 - moved the temperature/humidity/pressure sensor from 8meters above gound, just under the roofline to about 1 meter from the ground, for easier access and for better temperature placement. Repaired the white aircore ventilated housing. Noticed that the temperature went up 2 degrees (the ground was colder than the air so the higher temperatures may have been reflected off the house) and that the variation from reading to reading settled down quite a lot, perhaps indicating that wind gusts off the (hot) roof influenced the temperature. Also the out of range errors seem to have stopped. The white housing will still get direct sunlight until about local noon. Another shield will be placed in front of this in the next few days to prevent any sun from striking the housing.

2004 February 10 - installed RF choke coil around the data line in an effort to reduce possible EMF interference.

2004 January 14 - weather station computer has been broken for the last couple of weeks. Fixed by using laptop and installin the FreeWx software into it as a temporary measure.

2003 November - moved the junction box down from the roof soffit and placed it inside a wooden box down on the deck for easier access to check the connectors for corrosion, etc. Doesn't seemed to have helped, so the next repair effort will be the resistor fix

2003 August - Coincidentally perhaps, after the major Eastern North America power outage in August, the temperature and humidity sensor started acting up, giving null or "-----" readings.

In the beginning (Fall 2002) we placed the sensors in the front yard, closest to a data logging computer. Over the course of the first few months, we discovered that the main breakout box contacts had corroded. Not being able to easily order replacements here, I soldered a cat5 cable into the breakout box and extended the cable run by another 5 metres or so adding a female cat5 RJ45 jack on the end, something that we needed in able to move the sensors around the house to the back antenna mast.
This allowed us to move to another data logging computer (specs listed above), freeing up the games machine :)
We then wrapped up the box and its contacts inside a plastic bag wrapped up in electrical tape to keep out water and moisture.
Having moved the sensors in early April 2003, we now have more accurate wind speed and direction (previously the house was blocking easterly winds), better temperature readings (we built a little shade house out of plastic aircore material. Previously when the sun hit the sensor, its readings would soar unrealistically.

Yarker Station Weather Data

The data below are in .CSV format (comma seperated values) and can easily be imported into any modern spreadsheet program like Corel Quattro Pro or MS Excel.

Daily Extreme stats:

Each entry details the extreme conditions for the 24 hours ENDING at the changeover time on the date shown for that entry.
Download a ZIP file of all months extremes

2002	2003	2004	2005
	january	january	january
	february	february	february
	march	march	march
	april	april	april
	may	may	may
	june	june	june
	july	july	july
	august	august	august
	september	september	september
october	october	october
	november	november
	december

Daily Hourly data readings:

These are the hourly data (when available) for each day.
Download a ZIP file of all months hourly data

2002	2003	2004	2005
	january	january	january
	february	february	february
	march	march	march
		april	april
		may	may
		june	june
		july	july
		august	august
		september	september
October		october
November
December