Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions

skadude
skadude Registered Users Posts: 4
in General Solar Power Topics #1
I'm looking to install some weather stations out in the sticks in Africa. Due to inconsistent internet availability at the weather station sites, I want to send my data automatically to the cloud when possible. I need to include solar insolation data, and so far I haven't found a host site that will do solar and weather data free of charge. Any suggestions?
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  • BB.
    BB. Super Moderators, Administrators Posts: 33,658 admin
    #2
    Re: Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions

    I have not tried it (or know any details about the website)--But I believe these folks will work for you (and they support logging of solar insolation):

    http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/index.asp

    -Bill
    Near San Francisco California: 3.5kWatt Grid Tied Solar power system+small backup genset
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  • mikeo
    mikeo Solar Expert Posts: 386 ✭✭✭
    #3
    Re: Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions
    I need to include solar insolation data, and so far I haven't found a host site that will do solar and weather data free of charge. Any suggestions?
    CWOP now logs solar data and is free for you to join. Their data is disseminated through NOAA and WU among others. They also have a nice monitoring system to verify and flag faulty weather stations if you sign up for it.
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  • BB.
    BB. Super Moderators, Administrators Posts: 33,658 admin
    #4
    Re: Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions

    I believe this is the site that Mike is talking about:

    Citizen Weather Observer Program

    -Bill
    Near San Francisco California: 3.5kWatt Grid Tied Solar power system+small backup genset
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  • mikeo
    mikeo Solar Expert Posts: 386 ✭✭✭
    #5
    Re: Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions
    I believe this is the site that Mike is talking about:
    Yes, I should have been more specific. Great group of people to work with. Could be a good source of local solar data to compare with the NREL program as climate change messes with the long term averages.
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  • RandomJoe
    RandomJoe Solar Expert Posts: 472 ✭✭✭
    #6
    Re: Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions

    But would CWOP accept data for stations in Africa? I thought that was US-only, or at least North America. Took a quick look through the site but didn't see anything saying one way or the other...

    I'm curious, what equipment would be present at the weather stations? Is the weather station directly connected to the net connection, or is there a PC collecting data from the station then forwarding that on somewhere?

    If there's a PC, an option that comes to my mind is to use wview http://www.wviewweather.com/ to collect the data. It will also generate archives locally, and in addition to supporting several weather-observer programs (including CWOP) can also just upload HTML pages (which can be customized to suit if you desire - the defaults are quite nice though) and text log files to a remote web server somewhere via FTP or SSH. Then you could get free/cheap web hosting and simply collect the data yourself, if that's useful to your purposes.

    Wview runs on Linux/FreeBSD/Unix or OSX. It'll talk to a large number of different models of weather stations.

    I run Wview on my weather station, you can see how its data looks here: http://n5usr.net/weather/ (But I don't have the insolation sensor on mine.) I don't upload to CWOP or such, since my location is bad and really skews some of the readings I get, especially wind.

    One caveat, I don't know how wview reacts to an intermittent connection, never tried that! It uploads the latest data periodically (time set in config) so hopefully it'd just fail gracefully and try again later. There is a pretty good manual on the website.
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  • mikeo
    mikeo Solar Expert Posts: 386 ✭✭✭
    #7
    Re: Online Weather Data Hosting Suggestions
    'm curious, what equipment would be present at the weather stations? Is the weather station directly connected to the net connection, or is there a PC collecting data from the station then forwarding that on somewhere?
    It's done both ways. I have Davis WeatherlinkIP which plugs directly into my router. I have my weather station and router on a 12 volt auto/marine battery with a 12 volt charger plugged into the AC. My station has worked 24/7 for about 3 years now sending data once a minute to the Davis servers which do archive the data. From their servers it is disseminated to WU and CWOP. Others use a PC or SLUG which runs Linux and appropriate software to collect and disseminate the data.
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