About the Oxford Weather Station

The Oxford city weather station was set up and web-enabled by The Big Oxford Computer Company Ltd (BOCC) based in the City of Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

Weather station

The weather station, purchased from Prodata Weather Systems, is a Vantage Pro system from Davis Instruments. The Vantage Pro measures inside and outside temperature, wind speed and direction, wind chill, rainfall rate, daily and accumulated rainfall, barometric pressure, inside and outside humidity, and dew point.

Instrumentation

The Vantage Pro external sensor assembly (integrated sensor array or ISS), with standard radiation shield, is located on a mast above the roof of the BOCC's Oxford office and includes a self-emptying bucket rain collector, an anemometer, and temperature/humidity sensor and is connected by cable to a remote display console located securely inside. The console also measures barometric pressure and internal temperatures (providing dew point and calculated humidity).

An instrumentation diagram showing the elements is shown below:

Data processing

The information gathered by the Vantage Pro is logged and periodically transferred, using Davis Weatherlink software, to a web server for processing and eventually displayed on a web pages, as illustrated by the diagram below:

Software

The Vantage Pro console stores data, but the Weatherlink software is used to download the data and write data files 24 times per hour. These are imported by custom scripts, written by BOCC, and the data are recorded in a MS-SQL database. At each import, graphs and charts are built for use on the BOCC and Oxford Weather Station main pages. All the weather station pages and charts are created by software written by BOCC, using application software running on the web server hosted by BOCC.

BOCC's system provides online data export, graphing and syndication. Users can also send the current weather to email, fax and mobile phone addresses.

Observations

Images are captured and processed every minute. Processing, undertaken automatically server-side, includes resizing, adjusting brightness, cropping, labelling. Hourly images are kept for a day, a single daily image is kept forever.

Syndication

BOCC offers live Oxford weather syndication services. For example, there is a daily weather XML service created as RSS-based weather data. A sample file for yesterday is available:

However, the preferred method of syndication is using a secure SOAP web service, an XML based object protocol for the exchange of information. Properties in the form of web service definition language (WSDL) are located at the following addresses:

• Web service
• Credentials
• Data record

Please use our enquiry form to contact us if you would like to know more or to purchase a subscription, and we will call you back to discuss the options, or contact Tracy Walker on 01865 717770.

Other pages: Oxford weather station | Export data | Enquiry form