Weather Sensors – 2 Weeks On
Update – the original images used for this article are no longer available.
Two weeks have gone since I made the update to the weather sensors and it is time to look back at the changes seen over that time period.
The air temperature sensor is now back to normal, with the apparently higher than expected temperatures more like summer weather than late winter being back to normal. The sensor had moved out of where it normally is and at times was exposed to direct sunlight, hence the higher readings.
The change in the humidity sensor has made a very clear impact on the quality of the data returned. Gone are the near 100% readings and we are back to seeing daily variations of the humidity as expected. With the old sensor I’ve had it connected to an Arduino which will display the temperature and humidity on an LCD screen. The temperature values seem to be accurate, but even inside the humidity is always at or near 100%, so clearly faulty.
The pressure sensor is continuing to work as expected, with the small gap in the data being the time I was working on the sensor array inside, hence no measurements taken.
The moisture sensor is still using the old version which has had most of the sensor tracks corroded away hence the almost constant very low readings, other than two measurements which align to heavy rainfall. The replacement, plus a spare, are still in transit and once arrived the old one will be replaced.
After Auckland having seen a lower than usual amount of rain over late autumn and early winter, the last month has seen some pretty intense rain at times. These values are for the amount in a 15 minute period which reflects the intensity of some of the rain events.
The cumulative rainfall shows just over 120mm of rain in the last month with the individual rain events almost non-visible except for a few of the very intense rain events.
With the light intensity sensor being newly added we are seeing that it is functioning as expected with clear variations being seen between day and night plus differences in the relative brightness between different days. Comparing the intensity to the cloud cover is highly likely to result in a clear positive correlation as you’d expect.
The UV index, plus the components, have returned to showing a more expected behaviour with positive values during the day. With the sensor not being changed, this is likely to be a result of the rotation of the UV transparent plastic tube to a non-weathered, not as transparent side upmost.
