Weather Stations at Funston

We've had several questions about the new weather readings at Fort Funson, so here's the deal.

In 2007 the club installed a new weather station on top of the clubhouse at Fort Funston for viewing wind and other data on the flyfunston.org web site. There are now two stations supplying data to flyfunston.org. In addition, there is a pre-existing, wind speed/direction gauge on top of the clubhouse for the telephone-only wind talker.

Why put in a weather station at the Clubhouse?

• The weather station at the clubhouse more closely represents the wind at the Funston launch. The Stables station is almost a mile away from launch and frequently in a different air mass.
• The clubhouse station is accessible by all pilots who can get into the clubhouse, so if it goes down there are more people who can reset it. The Stables weather station is in a volunteer's home, so the club can only only kindly request of the volunteer that he reset the computer.

Is it calibrated to Magnetic North or True North?

• It's pretty close to True North, give or take a few degrees.
• We were surprised how far off the cliff is from True West. Have a look at the above photo.

Why is there an additional weather vane, anememometer and big black bucket-y thing on the pole at the clubhouse? And what's the bucket?

• The other, black weather vane/anemometer that's been on the clubhouse for years connects into the telephone-only wind talker. We didn't want to tap into that system because the computer connection is older and less documented and because the wind talker works so well we didn't want to risk breaking it.
• As a result, we installed an additional weather sensor system that only feeds data into a computer for viewing on the web.
• The black bucket contains instruments to measure rainfall, humidity, temperature and air pressure
• The big, silver wind vane and anemometer on the top of the weather pole is the property of the Bay Area Air Quality Management district. We weren't permitted to connect directly into that weather station.
• Yes, we realize having 3 stations on the pole looks a little excessive. No, we aren't compensating for anything.

What's with all the different diagrams and charts? Which ones come from the Clubhouse wind meter?

• These are different ways of looking at the same information. We're experimenting to see what works best. Try them all. See what works best for you. Tell your friends.
• Except for the tabular data at the bottom of the webcam page - which is labeled as coming from the Stables - all of the other views are based on the readings coming from the wind meter on the clubhouse

What kind of weather station did you buy? What software do you use to run it?

• We use a Davis Vantage Pro2 Wireless Weather Station , model 6152- see Ambient Weather for details. Available from Ambient or eBay.
• A Davis data logger to connect it to the USB port of a computer - available only with the Weatherlink package for USB
• We use the open source, Linux-based WView package to run the whole show
• If you're interested in further details, get in touch with us