The UK’s met office has started a service where you can send your home weather data to their servers.

An article covering how to do this for a WS2350 unit, using PHP is included here.

The current observations can be found here.

I hope it helps you take part and be involved.

A common problem nowadays is how to create flash videos, but not have to download windows applications to do it.

If you are happy to run Linux, then you can use Mencoder, part of the MPlayer suite of applications. Either use RPM manager, Yum or another package manager to download the package to your Linux desktop. Then get you WMV file from a digital camera or from Microsoft Windows Movie Maker and get it onto your linux PC.

Now, to use Mencoder means you have to type stuff at the command prompt (shell). In the same folder as the WMV file, type out the following command line and parameters.

This version will encode at 500k video:


mencoder Winter_Aero_Tow_0002.wmv -o Winter_Aero_Tow_0002z.wmv.flv -of lavf -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=500:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 -srate 22050 -ofp 24


The output was about 21Mb.

This version uses 400k video – deriving a saving of 50% (output 11Mb).

mencoder RGC_Summer.wmv -o sum.wmv.flv -of lavf -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=400:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 -srate 22050 -ofps 24


This will create a flash video that you can play on the Linux PC (using Mplayer or similar). Now you can use the flash-encoded file as you wish.

Have an Ultimeter weather station? You can then send the data to CWOP if you use the recipe here.

One of the problems with looking at weather forecasts is that they change over time.

In particular the local forecast for the dry and saturated lapse rates needed some kind of animation to make it easier to see what was happening over the day.

Well, a quick and easy method on how it was done has been added to the development posts. An example of the output is below.