About

This site serves weather information for Hamilton, New Zealand collected by a weather station near Newstead. It uses a Vantage Vue weather station built by Davis Instruments. This weather station was installed on the 9th of February 2013 replacing an older much less accurate FineOffset WH1080 device which operated from the 22nd of March 2012.

Data Quality Notes

This weather station is located on a rural section with a large number of trees which interferes with wind readings quite severely. Even on quite windy days the station will often be reading near zero wind due to the trees blocking all wind from the prevailing direction (as they were originally intended to do). As a result the wind readings from this station are not indicative of the surrounding area.

All other readings (temperature, humidity, rainfall) should be as accurate as one can expect from the hardware.

Due to a hardware fault humidity readings (and all other measurements derived from them) from the 22nd of March 2016 until the 20th of April 2016 should be ignored. These values will be purged from the database once some software changes have been made to ensure the lack of humidity, dew point, wind chill and apparent temperature measurements for these dates don't cause any problems.

Data from the old weather station is still available but its temperature readings tend to be quite unreliable in direct sunlight. The station itself is now offline due to failed batteries but it may reappear from time to time for software testing purposes.

Satellite Imagery

From the 22nd of February 2017 the Ruakura station started showing images received from polar orbiting weather satellites. Images going back to the 11th of February were imported at this time. The receiver is an RTL-SDR radio attached to a home-made quadrifilar helix antenna. The SDR is connected to a Raspberry Pi 3 which runs autosat (a heavily modified fork/rewrite of autowx for use with zxweather) to record signals with rtl_fm, process them with wxtoimg and load them into the database. Details on the various images produced by wxtoimg can be found here

Setup Notes

Compared to the Sandy bay station this weather station is quite basic. No webcam, no UV/solar data and effectively no wind data. The weather station budget was much smaller when this station was setup (otherwise I would have used a Pro2 and had decent wind data) and the software much less capable.

The Sandy Bay station currently transmits all of its data to Hamilton where it is stored in a single database alongside data from the Ruakura station. From there data for both stations is submitted to the MetOffice WOW system and transmitted via a binary protocol to the VPS in California which hosts this website.

The software running on this site was specifically written for weather.zx.net.nz (hence its name - zxweather) and supports both Davis and FineOffset hardware. It is available under the GNU GPL from ftp://ftp2.zx.net.nz/pub/DGS/zxweather/readme.html. More details can be found at the zxweather home page.

Some icons are Copyright © Yusuke Kamiyamane. All rights reserved. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Some icons are from Glyph Icons and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.