Intro:

    The observatory has a orion weather station (manufactured by Columbia weather systems).  It is located on the north east corner of the platform (next to the old radar blanker).
A single board computer (on the platform)  controls the sensors. It is configured to read the sensors every 15 seconds. Once a minute it will append the new data (ASCII csv format) to a file on the ao network via ethernet.

Setup

• Data stored on maestro systemdisk: It is exported as //maestro/MaestroSystemDisk
• In OrionWeatherStationData/oriondata.txt
• See ~phil/doc/windowsMount on how to mount it.
• Once a month, the monthly data is extracted from the large file and moved to a monthly  idl binary save file. Plots are then made summarizing the data for this month.
• plotting script in /share/megs/phil/x101/wst/plotmon.pro

Monthly data:

    The data for a month is extracted from the idl archives and plotted. The input data has been sampled at 15 second intervals. The plots (vs date) are fist averaged to 15 minute intervals before plotting. If you see any data dropouts in the plots, then data was not acquired during that time (most likely trouble with the weather station).

    The plots contain:

• Page 1: wind velocity:
• top: average (red) and peak velocity is plotted vs date. The averaging is over 15 minutes
• middle: wind velocity vs hour of day for the  month. The data is averaged to 15 minutes
• bottom: wind velocity vs direction for the month. Data is average over 1 degree bins.
• data with wind velocity less than 1mph is excluded (small amplitudes don't have well defined directions).
• the blue graph is a scaled version of the histogram of the wind direction. It counts how many times the wind pointed in that direction.
• note (there may be some directional shielding from equipment adjacent to the weather station).
• Page 2: temp,rainfall, humidity, and pressure:
• top: temperature vs date (averaged to 15 minutes).
• 2nd: cumulative rainfall for the month.
• if the value goes from non-zero to zero, the weather station was probably rebooted.
• 3rd: relative humidity
• 4th: barometric pressure. This has been adjusted for the altitude.

• 0906- cumulative rainfall for month got reset 25jun09. lost data.
• 0908- cumulative rainfall got reset 18aug09,. probably can recover total.
  
• 1005- cumulative rainfall for month got reset around 13,18 may10. lost data.
  
• 1004- cumulative rainfall for month got reset around 20apr10. lost data.
  
• 1012- lost some of the cumulative rainfail.. got reset.
• 1108- lots of missing data.
  
• 1303- monthly rainfail reset around  20mar13.. lost data.
• 1307 -lost cumulative rainfail 29-31jul.
  
• 1311- monthly rainfall reset on 23nov13
• 1312- lots of missing data.
  
• 1401- no timestamps 1.5 to 7.5 hours. cumulative rainfall looks wrong
• 1402 - no timestamps 0 to 7.5 hours. cumulative rainfall reset many times
• 1403 - no timestamps 0 to 8 hours. cumulative rainfall is wrong
• 1404 - no timestamps 0 to 8 hours. cumulative rainfall is wrong
• 1405 - no timestamps 0 to 8 hours. cumulative rainfall is wrong
• 1406 - no timestamps 0 to 8 hours. cumulative rainfall is wrong
• 1407 - no timestamps 0 to 12.5 hours. cumulative rainfall is wrong

• 1 -jan14 -> Jul14. missing hours 0am  thru 8am. Lots of dropped data. On 01aug14 a loose sensor cable at the wst was found and repaired. things started to work better after this.
  

processing: x101/wst/monplot.pro

Notes:

Rain measurements:

• temp info updated every 15 seconds.
  
• Rain records are sent to micro server from sensor whenever .01 inches of rain has been accumulated.
• After sending rain record, the counters are reset to 0.
• Rainintensity (same as rain rate?) this is a 5minute rolling average.
• The problem is when it stops raining, there are no records sent.
• The 15 second outputs from the micro server keeps the old intensity value. Even though there is no  rain.
• Trouble is:
• rain rate=A Inches/hour
• on Next temp read still A inches/hour.
  
• Can't tell difference between this and no rain on second read unless you look at the accumulated rain value. probably just as easy to use the rain day, value and differentiate it.
• Nice to have rain year. This allows you to differentiate adjacent values and see if matches with accumulated day.
  

Documentation:

Manuals:

Where is the data:

• raw data:
• looks like the data is written to disc about once every 15 secs via ftp from weather station.
  
• before 07oct14:
• windows: maestro:
  
• weather station wrote to maestro systemDisc
  
• /mnt/maestro/OrionWeatherStationData/oriondata.txt
• every couple of months jorge would move to the maestro public disc, same directory. with names that contained last write date.
• linux:
• i've copied all of jorge's raw files to /share/megs2_u1/wst/rawData
• names: oriondata_yymmdd_yymmdd.txt  start,end dates for data in file.
• 07oct14 and after
• weather station is now writing (ftp via pat) to /share/orion/oriondata.txt (on pserverk)
• a crontab script: /share/megs/phil/x101/wst/orioncron.sc  moves this file to wst_yymmdd.txt every morning at 1 minute after midnite (yymmdd is the date for the previous day .. prior to midnite).
• monthly idl save files:
• /share/megs2_u1/wst
  
• contains subset of raw data. 
• wst_yyyymm.sav  (about 20mb/month).
  
• created during monthly processing of data
• before 07oct14:
  
• /share/megs/phil/x101/wst/procrawfiles.pro .. to get rid of bad dates
• n=wstsavearchive(bar) to merge with idl archive files
• after 07oct14
• need to write an idl routine to read in files for a month,then call wstsavearchive.
  

Software

• idl lib:
  
• @phil, @wstinit (svn/lib/wst/xxx.pro)
  
• routines to read raw data,  and idl save file data. defines the struct for idl monthly save file
• /share/megs/phil/x101/wst
• orioncron.sc (daily crontab to move raw data files)
• procrawfiles.pro:
• this was the routine used to read the old raw files that had many months of data in one file. Needed to be run manually. tried to check the dates.. probably no longer needed.
• wstsavearchive.pro
• user passes in arrary (bar) of wst structs. will merge with archive.
• wstmkarchive.pro
• unused routine to read raw data from large file and output to archive. Not used since it didn't do a good enough job of automatically checking the timestamps of raw records.
• plotmon.pro
• make monthly plot for .html page.
  
• calls wstplotmon(). data has to already have been put in the idl save file.

Miscellaneous measurements:

04nov10: weekly, monthly, yearly rain accumulations reset

• power dip around 4:48 am. this lasted for about 35 minutes.
• After the power dip, time stamps for data records was no longer spaced by a fixed 15 secs.
• time between records went from about 0 secs to about 3 minutes.
• the jumping around lasted till 12:48. There was a 3 minute dropout and then the time interval between records went back to every 15 seconds.
• the cumulative counters for rain were reset at 12:49 when the records began to be regularly spaced again.
  

• Page 1:
  
• top: time between records.
• The jump at 4:48 lasted for about 35 minutes
• after this the time jumped around from 0 secs to 3 minutes.
• 2nd: rain total for today. This was zero all day since there was no rain.
• bottom: monthly accumulation of rain.
• There was about .78 inches this month.
  
• At 12:48 it jumped back to zero.
• You can see the 35 minutes dropout at 4:48 during the power dip.
• Page 2: blowup around 12:48
• top: time between records.
• Records should have been spaced by 15 seconds. They were being timestamped as low as 2 secs apart and as high as 180 seconds.
• middle: rain today
• bottom: monthly rain accumulation.
• This goes to zero a 12:48.

• time between records became irregular after the power fail.
• the timestamps are put on the record at the micro server so the problem must have been at the sensors or micro server.
• the accumulation totals were reset when the microserver started recording data regularly .

• The timestamp is put on the data  read from the sensors by the microserver.
• If the microserver was busy waiting on a network write, you might think that you could get a time longer than the requested 15 seconds.
• The time should never be < 15 seconds since that is the interval that was requested for recording the data.
• I wonder if the micro server rebooted itself at 12:48?
  

History

• 25aug14: moved data may08 thru aug14 to idl monthly save files (see below)
  
• 31Jul14: found loose input cable upstairs. reconnected
• APR14->01aug14:
  
• a bunch of date jumps
• not recording data midnight to about 8am

home_~phil