I’ve had my tempest station for a couple of months now. Since fairly early on, I thought I had a possible issue with the wind sensor in my unit. First off, I have my unit on a 10’ pole without any obstacles directly obstructing wind flow.
That said, my house and the neighbors house are on the east and west side of the unit, but only 1-2’ of each house is in direct line with the unit . Both of the houses are approximately 30-40’ away from the unit. I don’t believe that either of the houses are restricting the wind that much - if any.
We were issued a Red Flag warning today in my area with winds at 10 MPH and gusts anywhere from 30-40 MPH. My unit is nowhere near either of those numbers. I am showing an average of 2.2 MPH and a max gust of 10.9. In fact, since I’ve had the unit, I’ve never seen a wind gust beyond 20 MPH (my max has been 18.7).
I believe my setup is fine where I would expect to see accurate wind numbers since I am not directly obstructed by any obstacles below, above or to any side. How am I to determine if my unit has an issue or if my setup could somehow possibly be contributing to these inaccurate wind numbers?
You are not getting a clean wind flow due to a lot of obstructions being in a neighborhood with houses, fences, trees. If you could mount your weather station at 33’ feet above the ground with nothing at all around for 500’+ feet you would get nice wind readings. The good news is your station is sited better than most, you should get good temperature and other readings.
Also, the idea is not to be a meteorological perfect station. It is to know what happens in your spot, not what is going on 1 mile away … weather is so changing from street to street.
It’s like those using the Tempest to control the watering system of the garden, what use is it to know it is raining at the nearest airport when you haven’t a drop in your garden ???
Those are all good points. I’m definitely not clear of any obstructions within 500’. I guess my current setup is the best I can ask for outside of installing on my roof. And even then, I would probably still run into some issues with being in a neighborhood that I wouldn’t be able to overcome.
I agree with you on the rain comment, but wind is a little different. The wind was so strong yesterday (40+ MPH gusts) at my house that I would have thought that I would at least see gusts at my station in the 20’s. My station maxed out at 11.4 MPH.
I am not looking for a “meteorological perfect station”, but I would have expected to at least see my station recognizing abnormally high wind. If I wasn’t at home and just looking at my station numbers, I wouldn’t have even known it was extremely windy yesterday.
As you can see the readings are ‘similar’ though look at the direction of the wind, you clearly can see it is ‘tunnelled’ trough the streets and eventually houses and gardens. Depending how the street is in respect to the wind it can flow freely trough or bounces on walls and trees etc. Again, wind can be tricky. I once played with several stations in a circle of 10 meters in my garden, middle trees, behind the house and slightly above … easily 40% difference in speed and directions could even be like 90° out just because it had to bounce trough the oaks
Thank you for sending this. It does appear that my station is relatively similar to the other two stations in my area. This puts things in better perspective. I guess I just need to get my head around not being able to see “accurate” wind numbers based on what is being reported at professional stations or what I see in my backyard with tree branches blowing and swaying heavily.
