News items for tag weather - Koos van den Hout

Interesting weather this morning: snow started between 7 and 8, and it was nearly melted away again before 11. Overview on webcam.idefix.net Uithof archive Monday 8 March 2010.

Some actors are annoyed by being typecast in the same roles constantly, but some cities can be typecasted too: I watched WarGames (1983) yesterday and noted in a number of shots of Seattle it was raining. Now I'm watching Firewall (2006) and I think I haven't seen an outdoor scene yet without rain.
I visited Seattle myself and it's not that bad.

Anybody know any leads in receiving data from a weather station which uses "instant transmission" on 868 MHz? I'd like to receive data from such a weather station. In linux, on the server. Some device which would receive the data and present it via a serial port would be great.
Update: the wonderful thing about standards.. I learned that there is no standard for data from weather stations on 868 MHz and that a sensor from brand A will not be received by a receiver from brand B. Time to be more specific: the weather station is a TFA-Dostmann "Stratos". I already e-mailed a technical contact at TFA-Dostmann about this.
Update 2010-01-14: Answer from TFA-Dostmann: it is impossible to receive the data from that weather station on a computer.

The Netherlands, Vlieland with less snow
Image credit: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response

More satellite image browsing: the Modis rapid response system image gallery offers a lot. Nice detail in the latest images showing the Netherlands such as the Aqua/Modis pass at 2010-01-08 12:45 UTC: Vlieland has a lot less snow!.

Image credit: NERC Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, Scotland

Interesting snow cover in the Netherlands, with more coming up. This satellite image from this morning shows a serious white cover and some clouds. The big rivers are visible as darker lines and the ice growth on parts of the IJsselmeer shows.

The well monitored heating system worked a lot better during the night, so the problems are fixed. Only the heater pump ran a few times which I think is part of the frost-protection. The isolation in our house is good: the living room temperature only dropped from 19⁰C to 16.8⁰C over the whole night while it was below 0⁰C outside.

Hot water system fixed: the 3-way valve controlling how the heating/boiler system heats water was broken due to calcium buildup. Now replaced and suddenly things work as expected again.

A day with temperatures staying below 0 ⁰C and the first working day is not the right day to call the heating company about a hot water problem. They sounded very very busy on the phone

More scientific research into the problems with the heater show that the sensor detecting hot water being used seems to be malfunctioning: the system starts for hot water use about every 5 minutes even when not a drop of water is used in the house. Time to call for a repair. I hope the company which does repairs to heating installations isn't too busy with problems due to the current temperatures, those are well below freezing at the moment.

Snow this morning

Snow! And the associated traffic mess in the Netherlands.

We hung up a bird-feeder in the backyard last weekend and it is now very popular since it got cold the last few days, making for a few nice pictures this morning. They look a lot better at full size.

Sparrow in the backyard

Sparrow in the backyard

Beetje verstoring in de onweers sensor thuis, er was helemaal geen onweer volgens andere bronnen. Vermoedelijk een gevolg van de sloopwerkzaamheden van maandag.

Het is een regenachtige dag vandaag, maar de neerslagradar van het KNMI heeft momenteel geen data, en buienradar.nl is maar naar de backup-methode overgeschakeld, zo te zien duitse radar. Op de webcam zijn de buien te zien die voorbij trekken.

The lightning detector had another active night.. and this time I slept right through it. Nothing like the high numbers on 26 May 2009 but still a peak.

When I bought some 1-wire sensors a while ago at Hobby boards I included the lightning detector in the order. I installed it indoors in the attic where it also counts the switch of the fluorescent lights, so it will probably work better in an outdoor weather station further away from interference. But, in the early hours of today there was a heavy thunderstorm over this country and it counted like crazy. The stated sensitivity is about 80 kilometers:

this lightning detector will be able to pick up lightning more than 50 miles away

With the 75000 lightning strikes reported in the Netherlands for that night, the numbers don't look that strange.

I noticed some funny stuff on the maps plotted at the weather map site. Non-fitting temperatures like 28°C in the south of the Netherlands where it is -4°C to -8°C according to the people who know. Or 5°C at site 'EHDV' which was plotted somewhere in the eastern part of the country, near Marknesse, but the reading for Marknesse was not the same.

The first error was caused by the recent upgrade at home: Ubuntu comes with Geo::METAR 1.14. I did not notice this right away because they did fix the error about only accepting metar data from the USA. So I put in my own Geo::METAR which fixes the parsing. The other error was that EHDV was in the wrong location in my data. Searching using google found that EHDV is the code for oil platform D15-FA-1 which is also hard to find, but somewhere deep in the data history of air traffic control the Netherlands is the right location out on the North Sea. Where it is indeed a lot warmer than in the east of the country, thanks to less cold wind from the east and more warm wather from the Gulf stream.

Cold weather here in the Netherlands (at least for us).

Something that got my attention recently: the Dundee satellite receiving station offers access to weather satellite images. Using big dish antennas you can follow via webcam high-resolution images are captured from the weather satellites. The free images are relatively low-resolution (still filling the screen) but it is a nice enough resolution to get a view of the weather over Europe and see low-pressure areas develop.

First winter weather of this season: it snowed in large parts of the Netherlands yesterday. As a result the number of visitors to webcam.idefix.net quadrupled. Most interesting new link to this webcam I found was an Italian site about the Netherlands where I think they describe it as a view of a palace. No, it's just a university building.

End of an era: I noticed today that the METAR for EHSB (Soesterberg) wasn't updated anymore. The last one I found:

2008/11/20 09:25
EHSB 200925Z AUTO 28014KT 9999 // 11/09 Q1010

The Soesterberg Wolfhounds were already gone but now all normal flying seems to be terminated and the meteorologist has stopped.