Observe Daylight Saving Time or Not???

This is a question I have and not sure if this is the correct place for it.

I recall our local Weather forecaster would always remind us when they talked about Highs and Lows during the summer that the NOAA/NWS defines the ‘DAY’ as going from 12:00AM to 11:59PM EST and ignore DST for the purposes of record keeping. If this is the case, if we have dedicated PCs for our WD and weather stations, should be ignore DST setting and report all our times to CWOP and Wunderground as Standard Time and not report the time as Daylight Saving Time??? The manual for CWOP indicates that Weather Observations around the World are always reported in Standard Time…

One would think that by observing DST, we would create a records ‘issue’ during the two dates when DST is set or removed. You ‘lose’ an hour of data in the spring and ‘duplicate’ an hour of data in the fall, at least from a records/archive point of view.

Just curious. Can’t really find any information to elaborate on this.

CWOP ignores the time you send, quote from the FAQ:

What is the APRS time format? In an APRS weather data packet, the part between “@” and “z” is the time of the weather station clock when the packet was sent. However, many computer clocks frequently have large errors and to avoid these errors, the data time is taken as the time that the packet arrives at the findu.com server. This does introduce an error of the time that it took for the packet to travel from the station to the server, but that is usually not significant for weather uses. Marc, CW0009, operates a CWOP station in Antwerp, Belgium and has a time synced computer clock accurate to within one second. Marc sends four packets per hour on the quarter hour exactly. You can see Marc’s data here. The last two numbers in the time column are the delay in seconds that it took his packet to travel through his ISP, across the Atlantic, to an APRS server, through APRS-IS, and to findu.com. This delay is usually between 10 and 20 seconds and is not a problem for our uses.

Thanks Niko… I guess my question is whether I should use EST (Standard Time) for my own records/data… Then my High and Low times would be more ‘correct’ to the NOAA/NWS, etc…