Amazing Amounts of Water

Since my last post on the 3rd, almost capacity everywhere, Oroville spilling over. Great weather year. Oh, and like almost 40" on my personal weather station since December!!

Feb 3 California Reservoir Levels

Shasta Lake is getting close to full!

Drought be Gone!

So it has been officially declared, at least in the North State, that our drought crisis is over.  Woohoo!  Southern California should be most pleased that our lakes are approaching capacities and there will be plenty of water this year.

Here are some charts on our lakes up here.  I show Shasta Lake and Trinity Lake, the rest are too far south of me to mention, but show on the large state-wide map.

Entire State Reservoirs

Shasta Lake




Trinity Lake

Crazy Rain!

I picked the right year to own a PWS.  I set my system and went live on 12/27/2017.  Since then I am at 9.86" of rain!!!!!  That's crazy rain!

This is from Acurite's MyAcurite program.  Not bad stuff and you can export it as a csv file to do wonders in Excel.  I really want to learn Excel more so that I could do some decent graphs for my weather data.  BUT....wtih so many interests and so little time, it will probably end up being software bought from someone who has already done all that great work.  

There are a ton out there.  Here is a long list from Weather Underground .  The only problem being that there are VERY few programs that support Acurite's stuff, even though it is saved in simple csv format.  But, we'll see.

Weather Station Software

Windows

• My AcuRite
• Ambient Weather
• Cumulus
• Weather Display
• Weather View 32
• WSWin32 (English and German)
• MisterHouse (Home Automation & Weather)
• WeatherUpdate (Upload Only / No Graphing)
• WeatherLink.com
• WeatherLink Expansion Module (Required for WeatherLink software)
• Weather Station Data Logger
• WeatherTracker
• WxSolution
• WUHU / Heavy Weather Uploader

Macintosh

• WeatherSnoop
• Weather Display
• WeatherCat
• WeatherTracker
• wview

Linux / Unix

• WeatherUpdate (Free)
• One-wire weather . Oww (Free)
• MisterHouse (Home Automation & Weather)
• wx200d (Version 1.1 and Higher)
• Ultimeter 2000 Resources (Free)
• Meteo (Supports Davis)
• Weather Display
• wview
• thermd -- Temperature, Power & Environmental Monitoring(free)

Perl / Python

• WU-Upload (Perl, Free - Supports WeatherLink)
• wu-upload.pl -- contributed by Kenneth Brown, bogus data checking added by Bill Caloccia (Perl, Free - For Lacrosse WS23xx stations)
• Davis Vantage Pro script in CPAN (Perl)
• weewx (Python)

RiscOS

• One-wire weather . Oww (Free)

RAWS (Remote Automated Weather Stations)

Here on the Shasta-trinity National Forest we have 14 permanent RAWS and 4 portable RAWS.  We have weather data dating back to the 60s from these stations.  We use data from these, fed through WIMS (Weather Information Management System) to get our staffing levels, make fire decisions, and plan for fuel reductions and so much more.

I have taken on the role of RAWS Maintenance Tech on our forest and love getting to deal with weather stuff.  The data can sometimes be overwhelming, but the fire field has a pretty decent program called FireFamilyPlus that our pocket cards (cards printed with our local information to help firefighters coming into our area know what the weather and fuels are like around here).

Sensors on these stations get replaced every year, every 2, or every 3 years, depending on the sensor.  Each station has temperature, humidity, rain, wind direction, wind speed, solar radiation, and fuel moisture.  The station has a GOES antennae that transmits data via satellite. There is a car-sized battery to supply power and a solar panel to recharge the battery.

Quite efficient stations these are.

I've included a whole bunch of pictures of our various stations in the native environment.

Big Bar RAWS after a bear got hold of the tipping bucket

 Sims RAWS

 Big Bar RAWS

 Beautiful shot of the Bolam RAWS with Mt Shasta in the background.  Great station to work on just for the views!

 Ash Creek RAWS

 Sugarloaf RAWS

 Yolla Bolla RAWS

 Maybe Backbone RAWS, not quite sure on this one

 Oak Mountain RAWS.  Another great view

Friend Mountain RAWS

 One of the portable RAWS, newly arrived and unpacked and tested

This is not one of our stations.  This is a station on the side of Mt. Shasta to record snow

And here is a pocket card that we produce, currently working on a new version

And here is a sample graph from one of our stations.  We can change the input data to show any specific piece.  We usually focus on ERC (Energy Release Component) and BI (Burning Index)

CIAO!

PWS

I've been into weather since staring at clouds as a kid on my grass. It amazes me. But never really pursued it much. Working on the Shasta-Trinity National forest has given me a big responsibility in being in charge of the maintenance of 14 Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS). So my Wx interest has only been growing.

I finally bit the bullet and my birthday gift to myself this year was my won Personal Weather Station (PWS). Being my first, I went for the cheaper, but still good stations, in an Acurite 5-in-1 station with PC Connect and an indoor display. Here is a link to the product at Acurite's web page : Acurite 5-in-1

I am in love!

My Station all set up.

My data is logged on my computer and is also shared with Weather Underground. Here is a widget showing my stations's current data:



Here is a link to my station on Weather Underground:KCAREDDI89  You can also click on the above icon from WU to get there.

Last storm recorded over 2" of rain at my station. I set it up perfect timing for these coming storms!