Weather Station Returneth

It arrived back from Davis yesterday, safe and sound.

Bob and Dustin put it back together and got it mounted back up on the roof. The anemometer “tail feathers” are supposed to be aligned to the north (for correct calibration of wind direction readings) (and the photocell is supposed to be aligned to the south), and Bob had to root around through stuff somewhere to find his compass.

Then he wanted to know the angle of declination (number of degrees difference between where the compass needle points and true north {North Pole}). Um, yeah…

After poking around on Google a while, I finally found an online angle of declination calculator, at NOAA. Fill in the blanks, and voila! Angle of declination!

While they were being mechanical and all, I sat down to get the console up and running. Fortunately, Davis has the idiots’ manual online (even though the Vantage Pro is a discontinued model; gotta love it, eh?). Got the batteries in, the major settings (longitude, latitude, elevation; thank God for Google Earth) squared away, and the rain numbers fixed up (Boulder-Creek.com’s numbers are usually pretty close to ours), and noticed the console was complaining about low batteries (for itself, not the weather station, for once)…      :::sigh:::

Old batteries out, new batteries in, doublecheck the major settings, re-do the rain numbers; the weather station and console hooked up OK, and all seems well!