About Woking Weather
What is Woking Weather?
Woking Weather is a website driven by an automatic weather station mounted on the gable end of a residential 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, sun set, and provides a short-term local forecast based on the conditions it is measuring, its location and altitude.
The weather station sends it data to a web server that provides an animated view of the data updated every 4 seconds.
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.
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
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 database and a webserver which also runs WeatherDisplay Live. The webcam is an Axis 211.
The Vantage Pro 2 was purchased from Weather Shop in East Sussex, who have been extremely helpful and can’t be recommended more.
Future Plans
The addition of a fan aspirated radiation shield to improve the accuracy of temperature readings.
Installation of WXSIM forecasting software.
More Information
Get more detailed information on the data quality, equipment, setup and websites the data is sent to.