Lower Hutt N.Z. Weather Station - Details
This weather station owned and operated by
Trevor McGavin
in Lower Hutt, NEW ZEALAND
(location 41.2°S 174.9°E, altitude 5 metres).
The weather station is based around a Capricorn II Digital Weather Console (manufactured
by Columbia Weather Systems).
This provides temperature (indoors, outdoors & wind chill), air pressure and wind (speed & direction).
The Capricorn II is connected to a Tandy 102 computer via serial port.
Every hour the Tandy 102
interrogates the Capricorn II and stores values of temperature, pressure and wind.
The Tandy 102 also collects rainfall, humidity, wind-run and lightning counts every hour via
data acquisition hardware, a DACQ SYS-1 (by Rural Engineering Inc. VT, USA),
which is attached to the system bus of the Tandy 102.
The rainfall data comes from a
Rain-O-Matic
electronic tipping-bucket raingauge (by
Pronamic, Denmark).
The humidity data comes from an HTS-801 humidity sensor (Asian manufacturer).
The wind-run data comes from an NPI model A21 wind data accumulator (by
Natural Power Inc. NH, USA).
The lightning counts come from a Stormwise LSU-222 lightning detector
(by McCallie Mfg. Corp. AL, USA, now Stormwise, TX, USA?).
A picture of the weather station computer equipment:
Since the Tandy 102 has only 32K RAM, data is sent hourly via parallel port to a
Linux PC with *much* larger storage capacity, There it is processed, and uploaded via
cable modem to the Internet.
The Linux PC is a silent (no fans - yay!) machine based on a low-power 500 MHz Via processor, as pictured:
A picture of the temperature/humidity screen (after a summertime hailstorm):
Other useful links on New Zealand weather: