Weather Instrumentation & Software
Instrumentation
Werribee Weather Station is equipped with dual instrumentation:
- Traditional manual meteorological instruments, consisting of:
- Large Stevenson screen housing a dry-bulb thermometer, wet-bulb thermometer, maximum thermometer and a minimum thermometer, as supplied to a manual land-based weather station by the ABOM,
- Marine aneroid barometer, and
- Rain gauge.
- La Crosse WS2355 Automatic Weather Station (AWS), consisting of:
- Thermo-hygro sensor mounted in a marine (small Stevenson) screen,
- Tipping-bucket rain gauge, and
- Combined cup anemometer and wind vane.
The manual instruments comply with the ABOM's siting guidelines as much as practicable in an urban environment. The La Crosse WS2355 thermo-hygro sensor is 3.1m above the ground and the tipping-bucket rain gauge is 2.9m above the ground. The wind vane and anemometer are approximately 7m above the ground.
Software
Werribee Weather Station uses the following software:
- Heavy Weather (version 2.0 beta): interface to the La Crosse WS2355 and raw data logging;
- WUHU (version 1.0.216.207): primary real-time display and uploading data to the weather networks;
- WUHU_Tweet: automatic data posting to Twitter;
- FWI Calc: preparation of the fire weather index graph;
- Allway Sync: automatic FTP; and
- Custom Excel applications to produce the weather and climate graphs and tables.
Known Issues
- The La Crosse WS2355 wind sensors are prone to drop-outs during and after a rain event;
- The resolution of the La Crosse WS2355 rain gauge is 0.5 mm, which is unsuitable for daily reporting;
- The large Stevenson screen is shielded by a tree from the late afternoon sun during Winter; and
- The ongoing comparison of data from the two instrument sets has resulted in the following offsets being applied in WUHU to the La Crosse data:
- -0.3° C to temperature, and
- +1% to humidity.
Since September 2010, the daily maximum and minimum temperatures at Werribee Weather Station have been recorded using the La Crosse WS2355. The daily rainfall is recorded using the manual rain gauge.
