After weeks of building, calibrating, and testing, the weather station at KI5OMM is finally ready to measure and record some permanent data for the climatological record at station KI5OMM. At 1100 UTC the station was put on line and began recording data for the permanent record. Why is this important? Well to me personally it is as a record and indicator of the climate here at my ranch. Additionally this data will be sent to the National Weather Service computers to aggregate into their database. The more data the NWS has in their database, allows for their system to produce more accurate weather forecasting.
Of course there will be a few hiccups and missteps along the way, but I strive to compile accurate data. As I have discovered in past attempts, problems such as extended power outages, hardware failures, and internet outages have all interfered with providing an accurate and continuous record. I have attempted to construct a more robust station with redundancy built in along with automatic daily database backups. Hopefully this will provide a bit of assurance in case of a failure point in the system.
Collecting weather data is far from an absolute science, but my attempt to provide a continuous record will be much better prepared. A little good luck always helps too!