Notes, Tips & Miscellaneous Info.
06/08/08 I made a change in the "Feels Like" temperature displayed. The previous value displayed was the Humidex temperature. This a a complex calculation involving a number of factors, but humidity has a greater weight in determining this value than in the heat index number. The Humidex is is used predominately in Canada. Here in humid Georgia, the Humidex number gives an unrealistically high value. I have changed the display to use the THSW temperature. This value is more of a true "feels like" temperature than either the Heat index or the Humidex. The THSW takes into account the ambient temperature, the humidity, the amount of solar radiation (cloud cover) and wind speed. You naturally feel cooler if there is a cloud cover and/or there is a breeze.
06/04/08 Just a couple of changes and additions. Under Almanac --> Station Graphs, I deleted the Monthly graph (it wasn't readable this small) and added a last 7 day graph. Also at the bottom of the page I added a chart of All Time Records. Of course for Laurel Canyon the records start with 4/24/08. I hopefully have corrected the display of incorrect dates. In some places the date displayed was formatted incorrectly. This problem arose because the weather program I use (Weather Display) was written by an New Zealander and all units must be converted from metric and the date from the European format.
5/27/08 We are finally back online. Windstream disconnected our phone and internet because someone entered an incorrect phone number. We were without phone Friday and Saturday and withour internet from Friday until this morning. Of course the holiday and weekend did not make things easier. Anyway, we are up again and all the data for the lost days is there. The station was still collecting information and saving on the server, it just couldn't upload it to the weather site.
5/19/2008 Just a couple of notes.. Over the past few days we have had very unstable power service. I installed an UPS (uninterrupted power supply) so that should reduce the amount of time the weather server is down due to power problems. I noticed this morning that the UPS had intervened 29 times in the past 36 hours due to voltage fluctuations or line noise.
I still have not completely worked all the problems out with the icon display and description of the current weather. This is found under "Summary /Temperature" on the home page. The picture just above the thermometer and the short description to the right of the picture. These do not always agree with the actual current weather. Please just note, if it shows rain if falling at 1 inch/hour and the little picture says clear and dry, you better believe the rain gage, not the picture!
5/12/2008 - I added this notes section today. I also added a link to NOAA under "Radar" for a very good explanation of weather radar, the different maps and thier uses as well as information about Universal Time (UT), the standard time reference used on most goverment and commerical weather sites.
This morning I realized the Laurel Canyon Weather site had not been undated since 12:20AM today. It appears we had a very brief power outage and the computer shut down. The station instruments continued to collect data and when I restarted the computer all the data for the early morning was updated. I plan to add an UPS to the server
I plan to use this section of the site to relay information about changes, updates and times when the station is down for maintance or other reasons. If you see something different or the station is not updating, check the notes section.