About WeatherOLA...
This station is the first reporting weather station in Indianola. It was brought online mid-November 2011. It's powered by a Davis Vantage Pro2 weather station – an amazing instrument that's more then capable of delivering professional grade information at a consumer price. They are hignly popular in professional, industrial, agricultural and home installations all over the world. This solar-powered weather station is comprised of a barometer, anemometer and wind direction indicator, a rain gauge and a sheilded thermo-hydro sensor suite situated in optimal positions for highest accuracy possible. Placement for accurate wind readings is always difficult, and even more so in Indianola's heavily treed waterfront community. The location chosen should provide a reasonable average of wind speeds and gusts between the most heavily-treed areas and the waterfront areas.
The information collected by the outside instruments is then sent wirelessly to the station's weather information console. The console is then connected to a computer via a specialized data collector that allows the station to continue to collect information even when power is out. Weather data is then shared with a dedicated low-power Windows PC that was brought out of retirement to run the specialized weather software that provides much more detailed information and analysis then possibnle with the station's console. The data from the outside instruments is sent to the console in near real time then passed on to the computer and the web site is automatically updated at 2 second intervals with current conditions. The stats and graphs pages are updated every 5 minutes with historic almanac totals uploaded twice a day. To see what we see on the computer screen just look at the station graphs.
In consideration of the ongoing value of the collected information, everything is regularly backed up and we're set up to keep the system online even in the worst conditions. Even with absolutely everything out the station continues to collect data for later uploading.
When it comes to weather, information sharing is very important. So, our weather data is shared with other weather services and popular internet websites: WeatherUnderground, WeatherBug, Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP)–a public/private partnership that gathers weather data to share with NOAA, National Weather Service (NWS) and others for their weather models.
The weather data from the weather station is processed and uploaded to this website and other services by the very capable and incredibly detailed Weather Display software. The website layout started with an excellent basic weather website template designed to handle real-time weather data. It's been customized by WeatherOLA and further enhanced with an amazing collection of PHP scripts that are shared amongst weather geeks around the world. This makes it possible for sites like this one to do some rather amazing things. The result is that other then the simple "about" and "links" pages, WeatherOLA is completely an "active" website. The local data that's coming from this weather station, the outside data, maps, radar, climate information, the forecasts and everything else are being collected and updated on the website in near real time to give visitors the very latest weather information. Thankfully, other then rarely having to input snow depths, it all runs pretty much on autopilot.
With the basic information and design goals met, the WeatherOLA website is close to the functionality originally planned for and is up and running smoothly. The WeatherOLA mobile site is also available for mobile phone users interested in the getting the latest weather information scaled to their smart phones. There's also an up-to-the-minute weather flyer available, if you'd like a printout of current weather conditions and forecasts. More improvements such as automated emailed daily forecasts, SMS messaging and Twitter alerts, etc. will be added only if there's visitor interest in these features. I'll do it, but only if somebody wants it. At some point there may be a complete visual design and template overhaul. Finally, through weather.98342.org is certainly a site unto itself, this weather site is really just a component. Just the first phase, really of much larger overall plan to build a highly interactive community-focused website for the residents of Indianola.
About the WeatherOLA UltraCAM
In the fall of 2012 I started working in earnest on adding a weather cam to the WeatherOLA website. The first problem was finding exactly the right location for the camera since the WeatherOLA weatherstation is located in the woods a new location would be needed. After looking around for a nearly a year, an Indianola neighbor offered the perfect location to see the prevaling weather patterns. Next, finding a quality outdoor web cam proved to be very difficult so I ended up creating my own solution using an Olympus SP-500UZ camera in a custom housing and added specialized software to control the camera from a very small developer called Sebectec. This combination gives me the high quality of images I was after. All of this is about a mile from my house and is run entirely remotely.
As always, the best source for information and forecasts about our unique Northwest weather conditions is the University of Washington's Cliff Mass. I strongly suggest reading his daily blog and getting his excellent book: The Weather of the Pacific Northwest. Both are terrific!
You can contact us at weather at 98342 dot org.
About Indianola
Indianola is a tiny waterfront community across Puget Sound from Seattle, Washington. It is located at 47°45′5″N 122°31′22″W. It lies on the north shore of Port Madison, just east of Miller Bay. It is south of Kingston and northeast of Suquamish. It was formed on a portion of the Port Madison Indian Reservation in the mid-1860's. Development of the area began in 1916 by the Indianola Beach Land Company to form a vacation community. Over time the development effort had faded but the community remained and grew. Today, the area is filled with mostly full-time residents who enjoy the warm, small community flavor, the beatiful waterfront and natural environment and the quick access to a ferry into Seattle. The community remains small with only a US Post Office, the Indianola Beach Improvement Club's community center and the friendly Indianola Country Store as our only business. For more information about Indianola, Washington, see the Wikipedia entry here.
About This Website
This website is built orginally from a specialized template design for weather websites by CarterLake.org with PHP conversion by Saratoga-Weather.org. This conversion from a static site to a scripted site makes it possible to keep the site an "active" website with all sorts of added scripts to make the site work in real-time and to enhance the user experience. Template is originally based on Designs by Haran. From this basis the site will be further customized over time visually or entirely new weather site design and UI will be created by your's truely–a career graphic designer now in recovery...as my wife likes to say.
Thanks go to Kevin Reed at TNET Weather for his work on the original Carterlake templates, and his design for the common weather website PHP management.
Thanks to Mike Challis of Long Beach WA for his wind-rose generator, Space Weather Module, Theme Switcher and CSS styling help with these templates.
Thanks to Newtonandnoss.com for the tide processor script.
Thanks to Anole Services for the WXGraphic script that produces the site's Weather Stickers.
Thanks to Jim McCurry of JCWeather.us for his mobile PHP and Weather Underground History scripts.
Thanks to El Dorado Weather for the Ridge Radar and Google Mpas Radar scripts.
Thanks to Michael Holden of Relay Weather for his Daily Extreme, On this Day, Air Quality, Data Quality, and Raw Data scripts.
Thanks to Horca Weather for the Sun/Moon position plotting script.
Thanks to Murry at Wildwood Weather for the reports script.
Thanks to Steve Visser at http://sietse.net for the iWDL script.
Thanks to Curly at Michiana Weather for the custom announcement script.
Thanks to Brian Underdown for the Weather34 template design used to create MobileOla and Wim van der Kuil for mainaining the template set. Great work!
Special Thanks go to Ken True of Saratoga-Weather.org for the AJAX conditions display, dashboard and integration of the TNET Weather common PHP site design that brings so many components used in this site all together into a manageable shell. If you want to build a weather website, Ken True's templates and the WxForum.net are the places to start. Great work!
Copyright Notice: All contents, images and videos © 2020 - WeatherOLA.com. All rights reserved.
