Ryecroft Road Weather links and details Upper Norwood,  London,  U.K.    Weather updated every 10 minutes Weather Stations UK Davis Weather Stations Clickable map of UK independent online weather reporting sites Morden: live weather and webcam at the nearby Morden Weather      The technical bits of this amateur on-line automatic weather station were/are provided by the four Ds:  Davis Weather Stations;  Dr. John Dann (Prodata Associates Ltd.);  Dell Computers and Demon Thus ISP.

It all starts with a Davis weather station;  model: Wireless Vantage Pro Plus with standard radiation shields plus an additional Wireless temperature station which records and transmits the temperature of the water in the pond.  The signals are transmitted back to a central console.  From the console a Davis WeatherLink datalogger, connection cable and PC software enables the data to be stored and downloaded onto a Dell PC. From there a number of templates and images are created in the PC and periodically (currently set to every five minutes) uploaded via a Demon (thus ISP) Express plus ADSL connection to these pages. The figure on the left shows the reception from the weather station to the central console over the previous day or so - there is a large redundancy in the data transmitted so the signal only really degrades if the transmission is below about 25% reception for more than a few minutes.

    If you want to know more about anything to do with on-line automatic weather stations then I thoroughly recommend the superbly informative Automatic Weather Stations site starting at http://www.weatherstations.co.uk/  This site covers everything I needed to find out to set up my system - and Prodata were also extremely helpful in giving further advice by E-mail.
 

The location of the weather station sensors is far from ideal - and that's probably the main reason that you should not rely on these data.  In particular the main weather station is a bit sheltered from sunlight low in the sky (so solar and uv measurements are probably low) and the anemometer is not nearly high enough and is sheltered from winds coming from the north (so wind speeds are probably underestimated).  However that's a compromise partly driven by getting the temperature, humidity and rain sensors in a good location: you can't have everything but as I used to say in respect of something different:  'the data may be wrong but at least they're consistent'.  One item under consideration for summer 2004 is to mount the anemometer separately and much higher, using another wireless transmitter...    The location is Latitude N 51:25:15  W 00:06:40, Ordnance Survey grid X 531443 Y 170778 Landranger TQ314707. The main sensors are 81.2 metres above sea level (but the barometric pressure sensor is in the console which is about 84 metres above sea level). The photo on the right shows the weather station on the morning of Thursday 29 Jan 2004 after overnight snow.

    The kit was not cheap but it has proved easy to assemble and use and fairly robust.  In fact the only damage was caused by extreme weather!  Along with the Rochester Lodge weather station I also had a disaster on the night of 31 Jan 2004 when the tripod of the weather station was blown over. It is now secured with thick aluminium rods buried 50cm or so into the ground.

    If you want to know anything more about this on-line automatic weather station in particular please get in touch by email to: 

Further links:
This Ryecroft Road weather station is unsurprisingly within the area of the Ryecroft Road Residents' Association!
Also this weather station is watched over by the St. Joseph's Neighbourhood Watch
And just nearby is Norwood Grove, Upper Norwood