Jason's backyard weather

What a difference a few miles makes...

2009-06-07T16:51:00.006-05:00

I have a friend, Steve, who lives in Van Horne, IA that also has a web enabled Davis Instuments weather station. Last night, this storm rolled through Benton County about 4 am. In the radar image on the right, Benton county is under the northern most big red blob. Besides a good light show, we got .02" of rain here in Vinton, and it fell at a leisurely .17"/hr It lasted all of about 15 minutes. Steve, on the other hand, ended up with .74" of rain according to his website. The difference is, his fell at a whopping 9.93"/hr and had 40 mph wind gusts according to his web site. This no doubt is what professionsal call supercells. Storms that drop massive amounts of rain in very short amounts of time. They usually lead to localized flooding, have hail in them, and strong, gusty winds. Overall these things are pretty nasty. This storm spawned a severe thunderstorm warning about 4:30a for counties to the east of Benton.

In a amusing side note, Steve emailed me yesterday pointing to a website. For those of you who know the name Reed Timmer, you'll know he's a meteorology student that makes a living storm chasing. You may of even seen him on the Discovery channels Storm Chasers series. Steve told me to check out this link. If you look at it at the right time, it'll show a map of the country and where all the storm chasers are. Last night when I looked at it, every one of them was in western Iowa. A sure sign something was about to go down.

And on another note....

2009-05-23T22:23:00.002-05:00

I forgot to mention...the station now sends tweets to Twitter! Follow VintonWX for hourly updates on Vinton, IA weather, along with alerts if things are getting out of hand. This is a new feature I've been working on so it might be a little buggy yet. I'll continue to work on it.

The station is BACK!

2009-05-23T22:18:00.002-05:00

Well, I got my baby back and it's good as new! I ended up raising the mast about 15' or so for the anemometer so maybe that might get some better data. Who knows. I'm a bit worried about the stability of it, but we'll see how it behaves in a good storm. I was SUPER impressed with the way the station was received back from Davis. They replaced the housing for the radio, put a new fan in it, and I think I have new anemometer cups. They don't look the same anyway. It was certainly worth the $82 it cost to have it done, and that includes shipping! Anyway, it's open for business again.

Next thing I think I'm going to get is a lightning detector.......

Weather station out of service :(

2009-05-03T11:03:00.003-05:00

Well, my weather station has been faithfully reporting weather data for 8 or 9 years now, so I finially decided to send it back to Davis for factory re-calibration. It about killed me. :( Hopefully it will only be gone for a few weeks and back reporting better data. I think it needs some bearing replacements and some general maintenance, so it was time. In the meantime, I'm going to try to work on the mount for it a bit and extend the anemometer higher above the ground. I might even see if I can find a better spot for it all together, but we'll have to see.

I hope they take good care of my baby.

Occultation of a star?

2009-04-23T22:00:00.004-05:00

Hello all..

I took this picture off my front porch on the morning of 4/22. It's of course a picture of the crescent moon. The "star" seen tagging along with the moon is not that at all. It's actually the planet Venus. How can you tell? The "star" actually has a phase if you look closely (see inset). As a matter of fact, all of the inner planets (Mercury, Venus) and the moon are the only planets that exhibit this effect. All the other planets are always "full". On the 21st in some parts of the world you could actually view an eclipse (otherwise known as an Occultation) of Venus by the moon.

The most boring picture EVAR!

2009-03-17T21:53:00.002-05:00

I took this picture tonight (3/17/09). That white streak is the International Space Station flying over the house about 8:15pm. The shuttle would of been docked by this time. I think it's flying through the constellation Perseus.

Space Shot

2009-03-16T21:31:00.005-05:00

This picture was taken of the shuttle launch on 3/15/09 (STS 119) from the Jacksonville, FL area. Pretty cool pic!

A few additions

2009-03-11T21:05:00.004-05:00

I've made a few additions tonight. I realized there wasn't a daily/monthly/yearly windspeed record under today's highs and lows after yesterdays and last nights windy weather. I reported a gust of 58mph last night to the NWS. I see our high wind speed was 64mph though. I see the NWS has posted a windspeed of 44mph (at I assume the Vinton airport - http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/p.php?pid=200903110937-KDVN-NOUS43-PNSDVN). I'd love to know why I record 20mph more then they do. One of these days I'm going to send my station into the company for calibration. It's due.

Hail in February

2009-02-26T20:51:00.000-06:00

This was the result of a thunderstorm that passed over the Vinton area today about 1:30 pm today 2/26/09.

There was a severe tunderstorm warning issued for the area. http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/2009-O-NEW-KDVN-SV-W-0004.html for warning details.