With all the activity in preparation for the RMetS meeting last weekend we didn’t get a chance to properly publicise the new facility that was turned on last week.
You can now display weather details from a large number of additional stations, i.e. stations reporting on the CWOP/APRSWXNet system. There are now approximately 7000 stations available for display on MML maps, of which approximately 3000 are CWOP/APRSWXNet stations.
A few points about CWOP stations…
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They don’t provide quite as much information as a WD or METAR station does. The main item that isn’t provided relates to the conditions icon/text. So when METARs are displaying a nice rain or fog icon, a nearby CWOP station will just display its station dot. This isn’t a massive problem though. Many CWOP stations include wind, temperature, humidity, barometer and rain data, so they have most of the data required for MML to display. One thing you might like to bear in mind is that if you’ve got some big stationless gaps on your map then there may be one or more CWOP stations that can fill the gaps for you to give a more complete picture of weather in your area.
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WD users can publish their data into the CWOP system. If you do send data to CWOP AND the MML system is also picking up data from your WD clientraw.txt file, you’ll have two entries in the MML database. For example, you’ll find my station in the database as both WD00001 and CW1066. When you’ve got a choice of two records for the same station I would recommend you display the WD station because they will usually have more data available for display.
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CWOP station data is streamed into the database fairly quickly, so for many stations the data will be less than 15 minutes old.
As always, if you notice any strange things happening with the new data stream, please report them in the usual way.
If you’d like to find out more about CWOP/APRSWXNet, take a look at http://www.wxqa.com/. There’s also a board in this forum dedicated to CWOP/APRSWXNet, e.g. http://discourse.weather-watch.com/c/13.
