Category: Announcements

In the past month two new pages are available that show recent and historical data as charts for various parameters. This data is drawn from the weather station database each time one of these graphs are viewed. These new pages are:

• Historic Graphs that shows the historical data for the various parameters summarised as daily, monthly and annually. This uses data from the entire station record of the past 9 to 11 years (depending on the parameter). Among these graphs is the plotting of the long term average for each month of the year, along with the highest and lowest measurement made.
• Hourly Data Graphs shows the average value for each hour for the past 30 days compared to the long term average for the respective hour and month. Also plotted is a dashed line of the hourly average value. This allows to view the trends summarised as hour over time and see how the much the plotted data is above or below average (or close to average). This calculation is a little intensive, so the graph my take a little longer to load than the other graphs because all the sub-hourly data records over the entire station record need to retrieved from the database to determine the long term average which is then compared to the calculated average value for each hour.

Several new pages are now available on the website using data retrieved from a database of the weather station data. These new pages are:

• Past Month Graphs that graphically shows the data for the various parameters at 5 minute intervals for the past 30 days. This is functionally very similar to the Recent Data graphs which shows the last 7 days but at a 1 minute resolution.
• Top 10 Records shows the Top 10 extremes measured at this station for various parameters.
• Recent Extremes Since looks at some of the extremes for today and yesterday and compared that to the all-time extreme records and in the past for the current month by showing the last time these extremes was higher or lower.

Various other modifications that has been made and are summarised as:

• Some bugs/ corrections with the graphing have been made with the major issues being the home page real-time graph not updating with new data after the page loads and the “Daily Temperatures” and “Daily Rainfall” graphs showing dates into the future.
• The introduction of Past Month Graphs replaced a previously available page to show data in case of system interruptions. That was a non database data source and so this removal brought a reduction in bandwidth usage.
• Backend improvements to the file structure, updating J Query and consolidating the graphing to use a single source of styling
• The Seabreeze Forecast was fixed after it stopped working on the Forecasts and Observations page.
• The station status showing the station online or off-line on the home page and similarly on the System Status have been improved. It now handles instances when the station goes off-line when issues occur or for maintenance in a more robust manner. It does that by now making these checks on all uploaded data. It also now indicates whether interruptions or going off-line is a partial issue affecting all data updating on the website or whether is only affecting some of the data.

Today is one year to the day that this website was launched. Just over 2000 page views have been made from at least 1200 visits in the last year.

The Ferny Grove Weather website was created as a personal project to replace the existing website that was well over-due for a revamp and for the current weather data to be available online in real-time.

I would like to thank everyone for visiting this website during this time, many of who have have showed interest by returning numerous times or by providing feedback on how you like the website. It was not anticipated that this website would continue to see people visiting this website in this way. In fact during active weather events visitor activity of the number of people who visit the site would significantly increase.

I offer this weather data without warranty in the hope that it is useful. There are many people publishing weather station data through international personal weather station networks. However there are very few that run independent weather websites in our region of south east Queensland. The benefit of these websites is that they measure weather data at locations without official stations nearby with the freedom to present the data how we like to show it.

I am starting up this blog given this interest and primarily as a way to communicate that new content is available and content that is under testing/ or trial.  There is much planned to add to what we already have available involving learning different processes to deliver that data and that will take time to achieve. Additionally I would like to see this as a way to inform on how this data is produced and published if there is appetite for this information.

Please tell us if you have thoughts on what you information you would like to see on this blog.