In the past I lived about 50 miles between 2 major cities. The weather could vary greatly between the cities depending on where the jet stream is at the time. Neither cities weather was accurate enough, so I bought a VP2 and ran my own weather website. The data was true to my location and many of the local farmers visited the website.
I understand that Tempest “processes” the data and we receive the processed data. If the data I am looking at is not the actual data from my weather station, what is the advantage? If it were processed data I wanted, why not just visit WU or NOAA and use their processed data? I can understand if, say the temp was off 5* consistently. I wouldn’t mind it the sensor was automatically re-calibrated to correct any error every now and again. But if each reading is adjusted based on some “black box” to make the output what it is “supposed to be”, I don’t see the point of owning a station. There are many other sources for what the readings are supposed to be. I want what my actual data is and not an amount based on surrounding stations. Example, rain amounts can vary greatly, even within a mile or so.
I have done that. Where I’m heading with this is my station is on a camper. I know the standard for setting, but that is not possible. Also my station moves far from its gps home. I don’t want other data polluting my data or my data polluting theirs.
No, lightning is basically totally calculated based on surrounding stations and undisclosed sources of data, so for a camper moving around you might to just ignore that reading.
I update the location and altitude info in the app when I go camping. The only device I leave on is the AIR inside my RV, but it is listed as an indoor device so no temperature or humidity AI adjustments happen to it. The Tempest is always turned off when it is moved and only turned back on when it is mounted. The only adjustments I have seen have been to sea level pressure and that usually happens within a couple of days.
WF does use the data from your station to update the data in an area, it is not that your station’s data is ignored.
I don’t know about the lightning. It used to be station only, then at some point they added a lot of other data (I didn’t like that). To me it now looks as if my station only reports lightning detected by my own station. Perhaps they changed it for me as I was complaining about it.
There were long threads a long time ago about lightning being crowd-sourced essentially after lots of us noticed that the REST data for lightning didn’t match the UDP messages even remotely.
There also used to be temperature adjustments made based on wind as well to try to adjust for thermal heating of the Tempest case itself, and some of us did analyses of how the Tempest was slow to warm and slow to cool vs. reference instruments that were colocated, but my recollection is the the temperature tweaks were done as part of the tunings of the Tempest sensor and not as something done server-side by WF.
Granted, this was a couple years ago now, but I haven’t noticed any threads saying their methods have changed since then.
The station I had in KY was part of the Blitzortung lightning network as it started up in the USA. I used to watch storms roll across the fields from my weather room. Seeing lightning strikes in real time, and then watching the strike show up on their map a few seconds later was fun. Obviously I couldn’t measure the accuracy, but by the map is very accurate.
There is temperature compensation inside the tempest. Because it isn’t placed in the shadow, it heats up when placed in the sun. Wind would cool it down a bit, but as it measuring wind and sun light, it can compensate for that temperature by using good old thermodynamics. The output of the tempest is the correct temperature. Some have noticed that in early mornings when the sun is very low, it might not work as the sun sensor is on top and points upwards. This is all done inside the tempest.
Yes - I was one of the ‘some’ who noticed and did the comparison with reference sensors both in sun and in total shade who documented the situation. I also asked for WF to provide a way for us to know how much they were ‘helping’ (denied) and to provide a way to turn it off (denied). I gave up.
I eventually sold all my WF gear for this and a variety of other reasons.
it’s part of the design, without it wouldn’t be a good temperature measuring unit at all. It would be bad if they disabled it. Mine works fine and doesn’t show the problem you had.