Meteotemplate Forum

Afternoon all,

Just set up some steel series dials at:

http://www.finchamweather.co.uk/templat ... /index.php

All works fine - apart from the wind gust pointer moves a few times and then stops responding, the red area then shows the wind speed, rather than the pointer.

Any ideas why?

Andy

G'day, Andy,

That does look rather odd. Have you both the block and plugin installed?; they are necessary for the ss/steel gauges. If you activate the 'mouse hover' do you get the same readings? The last and most stupid question is, is the unit level? If it's not, then it might be that the vane is returning to a particular direction when at rest.

I cannot help if it's a Davis unit problem - sorry.

Regards,
John

Yep its the same in the block - from what i can work out - the pointer is showing average speed and the red is gust. Is there a way to configure the pointer to be wind gust at all?

Its a weather flow station btw...

Andy

Kind of talking to myself here - but if anyone else is interested in viewing gust speed on the dials, rather than average then simply:

swap over - cache.value = extractDecimal(data.wlatest);

to

cache.value = extractDecimal(data.wgust);

in guages.php

I think its more indicative of the wind....

http://www.finchamweather.co.uk/templat ... /index.php

Andy

Sorry, Andy, Sunday was a family day and Monday a day for looking after my youngest granddaughter.

Yesterday, or the day before (we are on different time lines) I had a brief look at your site. It seemed to have changed to the extent that the bearing dial seemed to be working but that the wind speed dial was not.

Today the bearing dial is behaving oddly, as when I first looked at your site. The wind speed dial, just as yesterday, is not indicating anything (although yesterday it did seem to indicate the gust speed whilst the indicator didn't move).

You can see what my site is showing by clicking on the "banner" below.

This is my WeatherDisplay Meteo Template API setting - no need for an image, it's set for a five-second update.

The Metotemplate settings are as per the following image http://www.blaxlandweather.com/Images/ss.jpg

Thanks for the reply and the screen shot John - really appreciated.

My wind dial is running now - showing gusts rather than averages as i swapped things round. The direction dial seems to be working, it updates every 3 seconds via a Weather Flow system so that probably explains the variations at a fine level.



Andy

With the extremely quick updates you are using, there will be little to no difference between "gust" and "wind" as there is no time to allow for an average wind over your brief span.

Technically, the very quick updates should all be called wind and you will actually not have any gusts since you have little to no average wind to compare.

People use a quick update usually because they think that if they use a longer update period, they will lose data, which is not true. For instance if you update every 30 secs and get readings every 3 secs, then you will have SUM(Speed)/10 as an average and MAX(Speed) as a gust. Updates every 3 secs results in SUM(Speed)/1 which of course is just SUM(Speed) and then MAX(Speed) is the same as SUM(Speed) since there is only 1 reading. [SUM(Speed)/X = Wind ... MAX(Speed)=Gust for most if not all reporting software]

NWS/NOAA/NASA definition of gust:

A wind gust is a sudden, brief increase in the speed of the wind followed by a lull. According to National Weather Service observing practice, gusts are reported when the peak wind speed reaches at least 18 mph and the variation in wind speed between the peaks and lulls is at least about 10 mph.

Some reporting software has started using this definition, but most do not as it complicates code.

Tom