During Tuesday 25th November, there will be an interuption to the weather station.

This is due to me moving ISP from BT Broadband (see News 20Apr08) to Be Broadband who offer up to 24Mb for a 1/3rd off of BT's price. I believe the work in the telephone exchange will take about 10 minutes, but the biggest delay will be 'me' realising I have lost the connection and entering the new ISP details into my router. So if it happens at 1am, the site will be offline for many hours.  It has to be acknowledged that the BT connection has been very stable during the previous 6 months, but the download speed has not recovered.  I worked out what is wrong, but I cannot speak to anybody at BT who understands and/or will pass me on to somebody that would appreciate the mess they .  So 6 months informing anybody who contacted me on ...@btconnect.com to use another e-mail address and time to jump ship.  On that note, take notice of the new e-mail address on the contact page.  weather@kennetsignalling.com

So, no news about the weather here.  Just ISP's, domain name hosting, data centres, power cuts and other stuff going wrong that appear to irritate me! :-)

As to the weather.
It's now the windest year on record.  Not simply recording the highest gust, but using 'wind run'.  That is how far you would have been blown by the wind if you were say, sat in a boat with no drag.  As it stands, over 50,000 miles this year.  (Still not enough to power my weather PC reliably though.  I think I need to make a small nuclear power plant as a physics project.)

Temperatures:  Maximum has been the lowest recorded in 6 years.  Without a full year of data, I can say last Winter and Spring were above the 1971-2000 30 year mean and the Summer was cooler.  I'll know about the Autumn this time next week.

Grass.  Apart from killing a lot of the grass when I eradicated the moss this Autumn.  (Don't apply chemical after drinking!)  I moved the thermometer that reports the minimum in October having woken to see a thick frost at the front of the house and above zero on the PC.  Although I believed the thermometer was adequately exposed, a nearby beech tree was perhaps shading it enough for it to report more than 5'C warmer than it actually was.  So I have relocated the thermometer to a much more exposed position.  This resulted in a recorded -9.9'C at the end of October. 

Rain.  Ugh, it's not the 20Jul07 sort of rain that flooded Thatcham, but simply by far the wettest year I've recorded; and there are still 5 weeks to go in a traditionally wet time of year.  No wonder everything is soggy and the slightest rain looks like a mini-flood.

Too busy for news, but was I the only one working away last week that failed to see the website update?

I reported a fault to BT on Monday 15th and it was 'escalated' to BT Wholesale. This problem was a very slow connection plus no FTP from the weather machine meaning no updates on the weather station. On Tuesday I received a mobile call telling me it was tweaked and some other stuff. On arriving home on Friday, I found the FTP suddenly working when it had not been up to that afternoon from Chippenham. Mmm!!!

Well over the weekend, the "BT Broadband up to 8Mb" has been working at 120kb (twice the speed of a modem). I've now been told I've downloaded too much, so wait until the end of the month. It did not matter that I've been away with work Mon-Fri with little time at weekend, and asking for a factual answer rather than what the buffoon on the end of line believed got me nowhere. Anyway, I am being called tomorrow to tell me exactly home much I've downloaded each day this month. Whoopee! As soon as I get a free moment, BT broadband can take a hike. I'm paying over the odds, but balance that against the fact it is a company connection with so say unlimited downloads, as if I actually used them. Then it was suggested my Wi-Fi network was being used by people unknown. It doesn't seem to matter that the network is so secure, only hardware I've allowed can access it along with the secured password. But this helpdesk guessing/nonsense is beyond me. I wonder how they treat people who know nothing, and don't have a free phone helpline?

So I am sorry if your weather has been interupted, but there are some back up addresses in place.

This one can produce graphical content for any day YOU choose. http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=ITHATCHA1

If you find www.thatcham-weather.info is not responding, try http://weather.kennetsignalling.com/index.html as this bypasses the normal address and leads you to the behind the scenes pages.

Of course these two links assume the weather station is running, with no power interuptions, and a basic broadband connection at this end. But you need to save them to your favourites NOW, or you will not know them when you need them.

Oh, and Heart Internet are still wonderful. Must find the time to move the hosting to them as well.

Happy New Year :-)
Since the November fiasco, my domain hosting is behaving itself. I never recommend anything as I tend not to trust people who recommend products they have paid for. Why? Well these same people are hardly going to admit they have paid good money for a 2nd or 4th rate product. I notice this effect (albeit quietly) all of the time. That said, Heart Internet are wonderful.

The 2008 menus should be operational now, with 2007 joining the archives. It's ALL available under the 'Historical' menu.

I've been much too busy to study the weather. My daughters are now 1 and 4 years old, both healthy and even more beautiful by the day (See above why I do not recommend anything, and in case I am thought to be biased... No! If they were fuelled on Sunny Delight I would not mention them, but they are really lovely children, the like Which? would give 100/100 and a Best Buy! I do trust Which? (formerly the consumers association)) University studies are quiet having taken the mathematical modelling exam in October (passed), but are about to get awkward again as the new course starts in February. (Astro-physics). On top of this, I've been working night shifts since July 07. Add these things to the rest of my life and apart from my mind exisiting in a strange balance of imploding and exploding and there's hardly time to write this.

But 2007 - RECORDS!
Wettest year with 961.0 mm which is 142% of the 30 year mean.
Hopefully the wettest day for the next 100 years after parts of Thatcham FLOODED and are still being repaired. This day saw 97.3 mm fall in an approximate 14 hour period with 75 mm falling in a three hour period. You need to take into account an amount of over 25 mm in a day only happens a few times per year. The flood was a remarkable event which I have discussed further with various University studies that feed into national programmes, and more recently a local resident who now knows significantly more about this event including almost 200 years of OS maps records. Hopefully he, along with other affected residents will get Thames Water to realise although this flood was not their fault, they will need to do something to protect homes in the future, especially with the threat of global warming meaning a bit like this year, it's been windy, cool and wet.
Windiest year with 50936 miles of wind run. This is how far an imaginary boat with have been blown last year by the wind passing over my roof. More than twice around the world, or a fifth of the way to the moon.
Coolest maximum temperature on record at 28.5 °C.

The website may or may not experience a short period of down time in the next 10 to 20 minutes as I've spent some money to move away from the clowns that were once award winning and respected.

In fact I'm in the process of transferring all of my domain names from www.123-reg.co.uk to www.heartinternet.co.uk. They are actually cheaper which is a bonus, but the good news is they do not have the RANTS of '123-reg' on blogs and forums you find via Google. The 123-reg website still is completely quiet on the havoc they caused this weekend. I'd feel a little happier towards them if they just admitted they messed-up, but to post nothing!

Oops! I can't post this message as FTP currently points at Heart Internet. The webspace IP address where the weather pages actually reside is currently propogating through the ether as of 15:49.

I'd love to apologise for the lack of service during the previous 36 hours, but in this case I WILL NOT; read on.

During the last month I've spent over £700 pounds on computer hardware to ensure Thatcham Weather continued to exist into the future, let alone the cost annual costs of silly things like batteries, 24hr electricity, insurance, (duplicate) weather hardware in case something fails, improved webcams, or my time when I could have been out earning real money, or playing with / teaching my daughters the alphabet, how to count, and why when I throw them up in the air, kinetic energy is transferred to gravitational potential energy and then back to kinetic, yet also adds an infinite amount of laughter that appears to come from nowhere. Then they learn about conservation of angular momentum, but I guess I am loosing you now... But what fun we have!

Yet this weekend the company I pay money to for the name "www.thatcham-weather.info" failed catastrophically. I've personally got more than ten domain names with 'them', but fortunately none of them bring in an income. Other customers of 'theirs' do run businesses and are pulling their hair out!

The failure was so unusual it is being talked about in online US technical publications just 12 hours after it happened. And instead of unusual, the describe it using terms such as 'incompetent', 'buffoons', 'disgrace' etc. Actual customers are shouting four letter words, including the C word!

I am already investigating ways out of this mess knowing it may cost even more money. So I cannot promise better service today, tomorrow, next week, month, year, but I will spend time I do not really have and perhaps more money to get rid of this pooh.

Sorry if I sound a bit<g> upset, but I supply Thatcham Weather for free, for the benefit of anybody that might be interested, at the same time willingly footing all costs. I'm lucky I have all of the data next to me, but if I am going to bother to run the site, I want it to work reliably.

I know one or two of you know the 'back door' way into this site. So if you really do want to know the weather, you can get around 'this' particular problem by using the 'real' address of the weather station data which is based in the USA. But PLEASE continue to use www.thatcham-weather.info as this is the station URL and can point anywhere of my choosing, but for the time being at least, it points to http://weather.kennetsignalling.com/home.html, where all of the weather 'stuff' is hosted (yet another cost!). The Thatcham Weather address (URL) is just a pointer from the 'company' (or some might sayretards<vbg>) I pay to own the name.

Only use the second URL in an emergency, else it will create many more problems than it solves, but at least those problems will be of your ownmaking<g>. And be aware, if I am moving companies, I will also be investigating the cost of the web hosting site (where the data currently resides), as the 'special offer' could well be expensive in November 2007. And the hosting site also had a spectacular screw-up of their own in 2006, but at least they learnt from it and have been 100% available since.

It's not the first time this company has fallen over, but I do expect them to in the future. So I will not simply jump, but do a bit of homework as the grass isn't always greener etc... But rest assured, when I move, I'll get things running in parallel and post a warning message that the site will be down for a short period of time. I'll also try to do it overnight as less of you are trying to view, I'll even look at the historically quietest day of the week.

The domain name registration company are www.123-reg.co.uk (I would suggest you try elsewhere, and there seems to be no relation between cost and 'goodness', so beware). Even now, 123-reg do not have a mention of this problem on their own webpages. Even more Fawlty Towers like, yesterday their own support page was missing because of this. It's so awful, you have to laugh :-)

From the previous posting.
I also rebooted the weather PC for the first time, and apart from a hectic 5 minutes of manual panic, it is working. As long as there is not a power cut, whoopee. (Although I now need to think about power cuts before they happen.)

A drought of news again. I put this down to working nights since July and my Open University course. Well at least the exam is over and there is a lull in studying until February.

Over the previous 3 weeks, the weather station and camera software has been moved to a new Dell PC. This was partly due to the CPU intensive video processing, the need to have at least two PC's running 24 hours per day and the noise of more than a dozen fans and around ten hard drives spinning away. The new machine copes with everything, and is virtually silent. In fact it is quiet enough to be eery. And being politically correct, I'll probably cut my carbon footprint too!

The new PC uses Vista Ultimate as the operating system. Although similar to XP Professional, it is different in so much as it does not like running software!
Are you sure you want to run this program? (Yes.)
Are you really, really sure? (YES!)
As Virtual Weather Station may be a malicious program, Microsoft has decided the program will not run to protect you from yourself. It's for you own good. (#&*£@*& bleep.)
Microsoft heard those comments and will now shut down the PC. Thank you for choosing Vista...

To date, everything has been forced to work, but I'm dreading the next time the PC has to reboot.

Unless you are colour blind, you may have noticed a difference.

In the mean time, July 07 is the wettest month on record. It was also cooler than the 30 year average (global warming, everything is global warming. I almost feel like ranting, but if I do that the government will no doubt introduce a rant tax.) The floods on the 20th can be found via youtube etc. I feel sorry for bungalows very close by that still have all of their possessions stacked in the gardens. I also realise how lucky I am to be living on ever-so-slightly higher ground.

I also realise the site partially stopped updating a week ago for just over 24 hours, nothing I could do as I was working away.

I'm sorry the sky photo (and video) stopped updating yesterday. I was working away for 48 hours and noticed the problem, but was unable to correct it at the time. It was caused by a PC rebooting (it does this about once per month). Now back at home, I've just altered the machine so the required programs auto-load on a reboot. Fingers crossed, but a few tests I've performed were encouraging.
Whilst here, I've added an hourly video so you don't have to download the whole day to see what the weather has been doing in the last hour.
I'm not sure how long the following link will exist, but it contains a very good set of photos of last weeks flood taken from the A4 2 miles east of the station. Fortunately the weather station avoided this.
http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=15202&posts=13

Rain; although the road outside is now dry, roads within 1/4 mile are closed due to flooding. There are fire engines from neighbouring counties pumping water, roads and pavements lifted due to overloaded drains, shops closed due to flooding, mobile phone network overloaded or out of action, roads blocked by abandoned cars etc. The railway has been closed as the track is under water, the M4 motorway is at a stand due to a landslide.

Since this station began recording in October 2002 it has been rare for 25mm (an inch) of rain fall in a day. In 2006 there were just two days with falls over 25mm; in 2007 there have been 4 days so far. The wettest day ever until today recorded 35.0mm which occurred in May of this year. But that rain fell over the whole 24 hours, which allowed it to drain away. Todays rain, not only being almost 3 times as much which is impressive itself, mostly fell in 3 hour period between 10:00 and 13:00 at an approximate rate of 25mm per hour. This has led to the problems mentioned above.

Rain; Well the current storm has already beaten every precipitation record the station had! Well not just beaten it, but literally washed them away. And the rain is still falling very heavily.

Wind speeds. I am aware the wind speed reports 125.7mph when thunderstorms are close by. These values are removed as soon as I spot them.

The anemometer has been fitted to a new mast. At the same time, a brand new battery/solar panel/transmitter panel was fitted as the batteries were due for renewal, plus UV exposure has started to take its toll on the existing unit.

Last year the highest recorded wind gust was 38mph, and so far this year there have been 3 days with wind gusts in excess of 50mph.

(NEWS - It never rains, but it pours...)
It's not that there has been no news, but no time to write.

Yesterday's gale. Apart from breaking four to five panels out of the garden fence and doing some other damage, the mast holding the anemometer is bent over about 20 degrees and making strange groaning noises. Being bolted to the house, the whole building is echoing with the spooky noises. Fortunately the anemometer is still working, so something positive to be going on with!

The 18th literally 'blew away' (no wonder the mast is groaning, it's not the wind, but statements like that) the station wind speed record with a gust of 58.61 mph (94.3km/h). I find it interesting that just last week (11th), the station recorded the highest wind speed since Oct02 and a week later it is once again windy enough to take the absolute record.
A second wind related record was broken yesterday. Wind Run now stands at 425.1 miles for a 24 hour period. (Wind run is a measure of how far the station would have been blown if it was moving with the air passing over the station.) The wind run record requires the wind to blow strongly for the whole 24 hour period rather than simply have a record gust. Yesterday we had both!

Another interesting fact for 2007 to date is no air frost (temp below 0'C) has been recorded since the 22nd December. Very unlike winter.

2006 Weather.
TEMPERATURES
The hottest day on record with 37.0'C on the 19th July
The coldest day time temperature of -0.6'C on the 2nd February. (It's not all global warming...), and the first time the station has failed to thaw during daytime.
WIND
Windiest Year - Wind Run 44,681 miles, enough to be blown around the world 2.9 times at the station latitude.
BAROMETER
The highest station reading of 1045 mb on the 21st/22nd December. You may remember the lingering fog at this time.
Speaking of FOG, during this period the station also had another record set. That of 4 consecutive days where the average wind speed was 0 mph, including two remarkable days where the maximum wind speed for the 24 hour period was also 0 mph. To put this into context, there were only 5 days with an average wind speed of zero in 2006. During 2005 there was just a single day (November). The last day the wind did not blow was January 2004. So to get 4 consecutive calm days, including 2 with zero maximum wind speed it quite unusual.
RAIN
By far the wettest year on record with 37% more rain than the previous annual record.
2006 also has the top 3 totals for rain fall recorded in a month. (Oct/Dec/May).
2006 also has the wettest month on record for seven individual months.
The last 4 months of 2006 had rain fall considerably more than the station average for those months, and if just another 2.9mm is recorded in January, it will also be the wettest January on record.
Coincidently, the hosepipe ban was lifted yesterday. Perhaps there will be too much water in Thames Water during the Spring. Maybe the water bills will be reduce...

Webcams.
The driveway image is no longer public as a thoughtful site user pointed out that it would be easy for a burglar to work out the pattern when nobody was at home. There can be times when there are no cars on the driveway and people are at home, and there are cars, but nobody is at home. But it is perhaps best to be cautious.
The weather camera is currently unable to upload more than one image at a time (different software under test), so there are no 'last 8/24hrs' pages available at present. I purchased two new cameras, but they both want to take up 100% of the processing power which affects the PC I use daily too much. The camera will be sorted by the time the days are longer. Something under test that is working very well is the site will get a 'streaming' webcam page at some point.

Rain gauge.
Since the start of the year, the rain gauge has been modified to record the rain fall pattern more accurately. The gauge 'as supplied' only records rain when effectively 1mm of rain sits on the tipping bucket (balance). Of course, during drizzle the gauge may not record 1mm for a long period, so the day appears to be dry although there maybe puddles on the pavement. And 1mm of rain fall is a lot wetter than you would first imagine. During 2006 the gauge had been modified with a funnel made from a water bottle. This had twice the collecting area of the standard funnel, so the station could report rain fall in increments of 0.5mm. But since the end of December, I've purchased a 12" funnel from E-bay and with corrections due to the fact the diameter is less than 12", and a few other required tweaks, rain now reports in 0.14mm increments. This has resulted in smoother graphs, rain fall being reported much sooner, and the period of rain fall being easier to calculate. So if you live locally and wonder what the heck that thing is sitting in the garden, now you know. Quite a few people walking dogs have been stopped in their tracks, don't panic, it's not a spaceship.

And from previous news, Zara Miranda was born in Reading on 2nd September at 00:25. She is healthy and the most content, quietest baby I've ever known. [Not science: I've only really known two, but observed loads...] Her older sister Jasmine (3 years) has taken to her sister arriving in her world and loves her.

The results for my physics course / summer school study were announced the week before Christmas and I did scarily well. This year I am about to start the Mathematic Methods and Modelling Course (MST209) and right now the results are predicted to be scarily bad in Dec07.

The weather station, software, weather computer, web hosting, British Telecom and Southern Electric have been remarkably stable of late. There has been the odd hiccup, but nothing to write about which is just as well given how little time I've had to write.

I'm intending to upload some Excel produced charts at some point. All the data above is already on the site, but charts put it into pictures. The rain fall chart will be the first.

A couple of good websites to monitor weather in real time. I will add these to the 'forecast' page, although may have to change the menu as it is not a forecast...
Not much Thunder at this time of year, but a German site called Blitzortung has live lightning for Europe, and you can also download standalone viewers from the site that run themselves on your PC.
And for rain, I've yet to see better than Meteox, (and it's free).

Time to think about the fence, the roof off of Jasmine's play barn that is in the field at the end of the garden and a new mast for the anemometer...

A new problem! The weather PC locked up at 20:30 last night. Just spotted, reboot in progress...

Webcam update. The new webcam failed to cope with daylight, so I am using a Philips one for now. Although this one tries too hard to compensate at night, which results in very large file sizes. The compromise is to stop night time images being uploaded.

Well I'm sat here furiously typing away as I've got to get the summer school assessment (see previous news) sent in well before the deadline. Baby number 2 has entered the 'window', where it can arrive at any time. Just as my 2.5yr old is getting over chickenpox. Not exactly weather related is it? But a calm drive to the Royal Berks is awaiting....

To the 'pilots' out there who may have noticed the odd psychodelic skycam image over the last few days. This is due to the camera slowly dying. (And the better camera is off line due to BT Broadband and please don't ask about BT as I might scream!<g>)
I am just about to purchase another webcam (anything but answer question 5 which is asking me to produce a scientific report on gamma rays and the Compton effect, although I have completed the experiment and managed to find out the mass of an electron - it's tiny! (and I didn't get the 1927 Nobel prize...)), that should hopefully cure this failing camera, also provide twice the resolution (4x the size of download I presume), and still be of sufficiently 'low' quality that direct sunshine at this time of day doesn't flood the detector causing the complete image to appear white. Well that's the plan.
So this intermittent problem will hopefully be fixed with an improved image in the near future. Unless the stork appears before the courier when you will have to wait!

In the meantime, the Kite Festival is making a return to Henwick Worthy (it's opposite), Thatcham this coming weekend, so look out for them on the skycam. Beer and ice cream, mmmm. Let's hope the baby appears when I am ready :-)

There was a power cut between 04:32 and 05:55, so the station is missing data. This also explains why the charts looks a bit 'funny' for today.

BT is still dropping the connection. Sometimes it is up for days, then drops 20 times in half an hour which causes the various connections (6 of them) to the web to get confused and generally stop uploading. Fingers crossed the connection stays stable as the website will be running itself the whole of next week. Not a holiday, just a physics summer school in Durham. I'll monitor it from there and get the odd reboot done, but will only confuse those left at home if the whole site needs shutting down and restarting in order!

Various records were broken during the heatwave this month. Of the 4 years of continuous data I have, it may surprise to you to know that in the year to date, 2006 is the wettest year on record!

Although everything appears to be working as I type, I do realise there have been a few problems over the past month or so. All of the problems have been outside of my control, but to makes matters worse I've been working away from home during the week and therefore unable to correct any problem until the weekend(s).

The hosting provider Ecenica seems to be behaving.
BT Broadband has been upgraded to the 'up to 8Mb' service, although it now regularly loses the connection and is the cause of the webcams getting confused and refusing to upload.
123-reg.co.uk which forwards thatcham-weather.info to the webpages is now stable.
And I've only had a couple of power cuts!

Having had a very wet May (2nd wettest month since I started the station in 2002), June may well be the driest month in my records - Watch the Extreme page. So the hosepipe ban continues...

If you access via www.thatcham-weather.info you may not be able to find the weather due to 123-reg.co.uk screwing up.
From their website, "In line with our commitment to providing the best possible service ... blah de blah ... we are currently experiencing intermittent problems with web forwarding services ... blah de blah ... 123-reg apologises for any inconvenience caused." Wonderful!
There is a way to get around this, but you will need to be here already to find the way around it. Catch22.
For the future, also bookmark http://weather.kennetsignalling.com/home.html as it gets around 123-reg and their improvements on behalf of their customers. Or use Google and search for Thatcham Weather...

Therefore I apologise for any inconvenience caused, blah de blah :-)

I realise a lot of visitors use this site to plan weather related activities. As your fun tends to take place away from a PC, you might want to be able to access current weather during the day. Therefore I've created a simple webpage for you.
From your WAP/web enabled mobile phone visit http://weather.kennetsignalling.com/wap/wx.wml for the latest weather in Thatcham. The page is approximately 1kb in size (very small). The only people to profit from this is yourself and your mobile phone operater. I do not and have no intention of profiting from any service I provide. As usual, any comments/wishes to me via the Contact page.

On Wednesday (26th) there were a couple of power cuts that stopped the data recording/transmitting from 08:10 until 11:00. As I was working 200 miles north, I managed to get the PC's rebooted remotely, but it meant only the small skycam was working for the past few days. All sorted now I am back at home.

10Apr 00:35-06:55, BT Broadband failed which stopped data reaching the website. All data recorded locally though.

Software upgraded to v12.08p4. Although I hate upgrading the software as the faults it has allegedly fixed usually rarely affect me, the bugs introduced may well do so. But I upgraded earlier today as this morning and once more this year I've had the software crash [Has to be something to do with an upgrade I didn't need]. (For the record, it was due to ntdll.dll)
I've also been playing with the colours again.

The station has signed up with Citizen Weather Observer Programme (CWOP). More details to follow

I was either brave, silly or drunk when I upgraded the weather station software today. This was allow the station to participate in Weather Underground's 'Rapid Fire' test. Data is now sent every few seconds, so the weather appears 'live'. Rapid Fire is still in development, but you can see it in action here

(One week on and the software upgrade appears to be without problem, but I'm still wary.)

The website, weather station and weather PC has generally been behaving themselves, so I've had no need to write any news.

BT Broadband failed on the 30th January between 03:40 and 10:30. This stopped the site updating.

The web hosting company (Ecencia) had a rather large server failure on the 17th January from 18:20 until 19:50, but couldn't say what had caused it, but were proud to admit they had two 'senior' engineers on site looking at the problem that couldn't be found. This caused the website to disappear during that period.

I've replaced the hopeless max/min thermometer from the UK Weathershop with a cheap max/min from the local garden centre. This one works, although under-reads slightly. But knowing how far out it is means it is still useful as a manual backup instrument. The Stevensons screen is working very well.

January's weather was different. Since the station has been operating, the mean temperature was the coolest on record, the mean barometer the highest on record with the highest January maximum. Winds have been the calmest, including the lowest January maximum with the dominant wind direction being the NE. (It is usually WSW.) It's also been the driest January. (All of this is interesting in a Steve Davis kind of way.)

Happy New Year

The outdoor thermometer/ humidity sensor is now housed in a Stevensons screen. This was constructed from a kit I purchased from the UK Weathershop. Very fiddly to glue and paint, but the end result looks good. The thermometer and transmitter unit has also been replaced with the brand new spare I already had.

In the same screen is an additional pair of thermometers. A traditional max/min to back up the electronic version, although as I type the max and min indicators follow the mercury column which is of course useless! The other thermometer has a 3m long lead with a sensor at the end. This has been placed at grass height and will be used to record minimum grass temperatures.

I've just added a webcam animation to the webcam menu. It's still be tested.
Thanks to Mark at http://www.cliftonweather.co.uk for explaining how he implemented this on his own site.

A brand new website is being created in the background with over half of it already successfully working. The new site has no frames, which will enable all users (you) to see more of the site without too much scrolling. The web pages are also smaller in size, so should download faster. Colours are also reversed as the blue is easier on the eyes.

If you notice any strange pages on the web site over the next week, please be aware I'll be in the background going bananas. HTML/CSS/Javascript, all new to me, but all in the new site. I'll be sat here altering the webpages that update every 10 minutes, then checking, testing, recording results, without breaking the exisiting site (too much). Hopefully it with be worth it for both me and the many users out there that visit and I've no idea who you are. Well apart from knowing the URL of say Freemans Catalogues visits quite often. Hello.

At the same time, I recorded 1041mb today which is the joint highest record and suspect it may break this stations record by Monday night. Another record was broken yesterday - Wind Run.

This is currently a test page where 'news/updates' will be added as required. So the first news is this new page!
I am also adding a RECORDS page where I'll put the highs and lows for the station in one place. It will NOT be updated every 10 minutes, but when I have time.
Although I've been meaning to do this for sometime, thank Andy B. from Hungerford for the kick I needed.

I would also like to thank Ryan Trendell of Oregon Scientific UK that helped me out in June with a new rain gauge to replace one the squirrels had eaten.
So a very delayed thank you due to not having webpage editing software installed.

I have also been 'brave' and updated from VWS software from v12.07p25 to p52. (If it ain't broke etc.)
Well this only cost me half a day to sort something that wasn't broken. Next update can wait until 2007-ish.