My plan for a hilltop station got a step closer today. The sensor unit of an Ecowitt Wittboy station was mounted at roof level on a remote holiday house on the UK Peak District moors. The sensor is mounted 450m/1475ft above sea level with a great view west where the main winds come from. The first point higher to the west is 60-70 miles away! There’s a slightly higher hill about 1km away to the north-east, but that’s only about 30m higher so it won’t shield things too much.
The house is also getting Starlink system put in at the same time so I should have a decent connection, assuming the Starlink antenna doesn’t blow away!
Hopefully both Starlink and the Wittboy will be connected up and put online tomorrow. I’m hoping to see some interesting weather!
It’s about 5 miles from Flash. I don’t know what the area is called. Possibly Blackshaw Moor. I think it’s on the old road from Buxton to Leek but again not certain about that.
I thought the Travellers Rest at Flash was the third highest pub in England, after the nearby(ish) Cat & Fiddle. Then it turned into some oddly themed knight eatery before it closed completely.
That part of the peaks is our nearest moorland walking area. I used to work with a chap who had a hill farm in Flash a well.
The station is now installed, configured and uploading data to the Ecowitt service over a Starlink connection. Adding Starlink to the existing building network proved to be the trickiest part, but it’s all working now which is great.
Next step is figuring out how to display the data on my web site.
I’m sure you know how to get the data from the Ecowitt cloud? The rest is just html design or it can also be a plain txt.
I’m very interested how this new Ecowitt performs in strong winds and combination with rain. After my bad experience with Weatherflow, I don’t have much trust in sonic anemometers.
I can get data from Ecowitt using the API but I was looking to use a template rather than bespoke build a full site and none of the current templates did that. Wim has modified a script to allow me to do this with PWS Dashboard so the site is up and running now.
I’ve no way to verify accuracy of measurements at the location. The nearest stations I can find so far are 5-10km away and also considerably lower (150-250m) so there’s no good comparison. I can’t even put a rain gauge there because the only people (apart from guests) who regularly go the are the cleaners who are there at most twice a week.
If you doubt the performance of the Wittboy for rain measurement, you might add a more conventional WH40 rain gauge for ‘second opinion’.
Is self-emptying and therefore suitable for unguarded operation.
Have seen this setup choosen by several meteo-fans (incl. myself) to avoid the ‘uncertainties’ of the sonic sensors in Tempest or Wittboy.
I could do that but having thought a bit more about it I’m not sure that a tipping gauge would be much more accurate. The site is very exposed with no ‘sheltered’ area where you would typically site a rain gauge. I suspect that if it’s windy whilst raining the rain is likely to be coming very nearly sideways at the gauge rather than falling vertically into it! On a couple of occasions I’ve been up there in a storm that’s certainly how it’s seemed anyway. So I think it’s likely that a traditional tipping gauge might not be any better under high wind/rain conditions than a piezo rain sensor.
Indeed it must be feared that ‘fierce horizontal rain’ will not be correctly measured by either rain-sensor, not sonic, not tipping-bucket:
the sonic sensor will have trouble with the effects of the hard-blowing wind on the sensor and on the mast (as I myself have experienced with my Tempest getting induced vibrations from storm Eunice).
No idea how to prevent those ‘inductions’.
the conventional sensor will not receive all rain in the ‘catcher/orifice’, not even if you would upwards extend the rim.
If on windy locations you surely want to keep the wind away from such rain gauge, you are almost obliged to think in the direction of a construction as described in Mesonet Station Design: Considerations when selecting equipment for... e.g. items G and H listed in section Standard Components of a Station. Putting the rain gauge in a pit is an alternative, with it’s rim at surrounding surface level, but with snow you then have another problem:
also precautions required that the pit has sufficient drainage to prevent flooding of the rain gauge.
Not sure, but ‘heavy’ measures to improve those rain measurements.
I’m just going to accept that, like many amateur stations, it’s accuracy is compromised by the equipment and it’s siting. The piezo gauge will have issues, as will a tipping bucket. The wind sensor really isn’t high enough above the roof line but that would be difficult to improve on when the location is intended to be a holiday home for rental in an area of natural beauty. The existing installation is fairly subtle but anything to improve accuracy will make things more obtrusive.
Likewise putting a rain gauge in a pit or behind a shield. The outdoor area is used for sitting in and kids playing. Anything at ground level is likely to be hit by footballs or played with by inquisitive fingers.
I’m looking on the station to provide me with some more interesting weather than I’d normally see from my home suburban garden and I’m not trying to provide meteorological standard data to feed into global forecasting models.
Well understood & completely agreed:
previous message only intended as a technical response,
with bottom line exactly hinting to the ‘limitations’ of an improving realization.
@administrator : I hope I was not misunderstood - I strongly support such stations that are exposed to tougher climate and weather patterns. Years ago I purchased the Weatherflow station to put it on a hill where it was exposed to strong winds and lower temperatures. The station showed to be non reliable: I didn’t mind the rain measurement error (it was fitted on a 6-7 metre pole) but was more bothered by erratic wind speed and direction measurement. And these were not correlated with rain or rain drops but solely to (high) wind speed. Concretely speaking, at winds above 70 or 80 km/h and full sunshine, the wind direction flipped by 90° or 180° instantly, at the same time reported wind speed increased by a factor (e.g. 1.25, 1.5 or even 2). After some time (minutes, hours) it came back to normal.
I hope the Ecowitt did it better with their design as I was also looking at the Wittboy
Congratulations with setting up the station, I was already looking for it in the Ecowitt map but could not locate it. Looking forward to interesting data!
The hilltop station is on the Ecowitt map…if you can find Leek and then look North-East you’ll find the Mermaid station. I know it sounds weird having a Mermaid on top of a hill 50km from the sea but there’s a valid reason for the name!
No misunderstanding…just reasonable discussion on valid topics!
It highlights a problem that many of us have about how well our stations perform. Most of us don’t have perfectly sited station components and there’s no way to know how much or how little effect the less than perfect siting makes in reality.
My home anemometer should really be higher but within the local regulations it’s as high as I can have it in a suburban environment. My only good comparison is the local airport, but that’s 5km away. It’s also much closer to the sea where the prevailing winds come from and also not surrounded by lots of buildings and trees that are likely to cause eddies and other ground effects.
My readings are typically lower than the airport, but it’s difficult to know how much real difference it makes. I work on the assumption that better reflects the conditions that I’m experiencing. An anemometer should ideally be at 10m in the clear. Mine is just above the peak of the roof at 8m but I’m sure the roof will affect the wind flow past it. However, when we hear of 140kph winds, that’s at 10m in a clear/exposed location. If I only record 120kph at the same time then that’s probably really what’s hitting my house.
Of course stations that have operational issues that prevent them from providing the best results, e.g. wind direction flipping, don’t help at all. I do sometimes wonder if that’s partly our fault though…too many want as close to real time data as possible with updates every second or two. It looks cool, but I think it sometimes hides the real data. If you stand in an open field you’ll rarely find the wind blowing past you as a constant speed from a constant direction. It varies second by second, so if you’re trying to display the data second by second you get a constantly varying result which makes it less easy to see the underlying speed and direction.
