Web Weather Station at Rossboda

Motivation

Since winter 2000/2001, the idea of a web connected weather station at Rossboda is an ongoing project. Such a station would allow the skiers, hikers and other visitors to get an even more precise impression of the current weather in Bosco/Gurin than is possible with the Webcam. However, weather measurement equipment robust enough to be installed at Rossboda is not free.

Actual Installation

After having analyzed the market for weather measuring equipment, we have come to the conclusion that a Vantage Pro from Davis Instruments would be a reasonable compromise between ruggedness, functionality and price. It is also guaranteed to operate at the temperatures to be expected at Rossboda, and many sensors are NIST certified.

Davis Instruments also offers a serial interface box to connect the weather station to a computer system, and all the programming interfaces are reasonably well documented (even with example source code). This should simplify preparing the data for Web access considerably.

Contributors

As with the webcamera project, Grossalp SA helped with the mechanical installation of the equipment, while operating and everything related to computer an software was and is being be done by myself. An open source software package implementing an abstract API to the weather station and some common reporting functions is actively being developed, and is published on http://meteo.othello.ch/. The companion weather station in Altendorf was set up under http://www.othello.ch/meteo.

News

On december 28, 2001, the weather station was finally installed! Data is displayed on the weather overview page starting december 29, 2001.

Links