The La Crosse WS-3610 arrived last week, and just now am I getting the finishing touches done on the mount located on the roof of our apartment. I was able to fashion an alternative configuration of this mount holding the anemometer, while the rain gauge sits on a level platform a few feet away. Later today, the Stevenson screen I ordered should arrive and complete the system by allowing me to mount the thermometer/hygrometer relatively free from the direct sunlight and external forces (such as vents from the building, etc.) it’s been enduring these past few days of testing. Being in an urban area there are small compromises to be made as far as siting the various gauges, but I’m confident once all is said and done this weekend that it’ll begin to provide more consistent and accurate results.

As of now, you can spot me already delivering the local weather here in “Rapid Fire” fashion, here, and here. The early results are a tad off in their higher extremes due to the lack of proper housing in the case of the thermomenter/hygrometer, but as of this weekend that will change once the shield goes up. The very last step is to buy some shielded RJ11 cable to prevent spikes in the anemometer data (somewhat common with this model), but that’ll come soon enough.

I’ve already developed as of last night a Weather Underground parser for the comma-delimited output file offered to the public from personal weather stations, which I’ll continue to refine (and offer for free when finished) as PWS4Cast. There’s a good amount of work left to be done on this to assimilate it to the same data schema NWS4Cast uses, but it’ll be worth the download to personal weather station owners desiring a more modest display of the current conditions once it’s finished.

1. Funny you’re doing this as I’ve been thinking of doing the same for a while. I have a friend who set up a weather station in NM and set up his own website with tons of charts, etc. It’s very cool.

   Brent Gustafson (#)
   Friday May 11, 2007

2. It’s really pretty neat. I’ve had an older one for a long time as I mentioned here before, but at the same time I wanted something a bit…more. I hear on-and-off comments about the LaCrosse systems, but the entry price was perfect and I don’t have the money to shell out for a Davis VP2 (which is considered by far the best). This’ll do for now until I learn a bit more about proper maintenance and usage.

   I hope to get a /weather section up and running soon using custom graphs and charts; this setup provides good motivation for playing with alternative data displays.

   Gary DuVall (#)
   Friday May 11, 2007