The Kennedy Street Station Location

The weather station is located in Brantford, Ontario, Canada at Latitude is 43.1538, Longitude is -80.2622, Elevation is 838 ft. The station has been gathering data and uploading it to the internet since 2003.

The Weather Station and Sensor Suite

The Kennedy Street Station is using the Davis Vantage Pro2 Weather Station. The Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 line of weather stations retain all the great features of the original Vantage Pro line but now incorporate many additional features and improvements!

The Davis Instruments 6152C Cabled Vantage Pro2 with Standard Radiation Shield includes a 100′ cable (max. distance is 1,000′) to connect between the Integrated Sensor Suite and the display console.  This upgraded weather station has all the features that made the original Vantage Pro so famous, yet adds many more features such as button realignment to make navigating to often-used functions much easier; a redesigned rain collector that is laser-calibrated to ensure the best accuracy possible; and a re-tooled Integrated Sensor Suite with upgraded electronics. The Cabled Vantage Pro2 also has a fifth radiation shield plate to improve accuracy and readings!

The Model 6152C Cabled Vantage Pro2 consists of a console unit and an innovative integrated sensor suite that includes a rain collector with self-emptying bucket, temperature and humidity sensors and an anemometer. The sensor suite is housed inside a radiation shield, protecting the sensors against solar radiation and additional sources of reflected and/or radiated heat.

In addition, this high-tech Model 6152C  Vantage Pro2 Cabled Weather Station will track highs and lows (and/or totals and averages) for almost all weather variables for the past 24 days, months or years and track your local forecast!

The Model 6152C Cabled Vantage Pro2 Weather Station from Davis Instruments includes a 100′ signal cable and other features such as on-screen graphing, forecasting using easy-to-read icons (sunny, cloudy, rain, snow), barometric pressure trend, inside temperature, dew point, humidity information, time and date, and much more!

Vantage Pro2 weather stations from Davis Instruments are the best for amateur weather observers and weather professionals alike!

Weather Data Analysis and Internet Upload Software

Our Station uses a software called weather display. It is written in New Zealand. Weather Display is the software to get the most from your weather station. Not only does it support a huge range of stations from all the major manufacturers but it’s also stacked with features and options. These include real time, auto scale and graph history graphing, FTP of the weather data to your web page, pager and email notifications of extreme conditions, web download, Metar/ Synop emails, averages/extreme/climate/NOAA reports, web cam upload, grouped file uploads, FTP downloads, decoded metar download’s, APRS output (internet and direct com port as well) ,WAP, direct web cam capture, animated web cam images, weatherdials, weather voice, weather answer phone, use of Dallas 1 wire sensors (such as lightning counter, solar sensor, barometer sensor and extra temperature/humidity sensors with any weather station), use a Labjack to add extra temperature or humidity sensor to your existing weather station (USB)… and lots more!

Weather Forecasting Software

WXSIM is a very unique software package – over 20 years in the making – for modeling, forecasting, or simply studying weather. It is perhaps best described as an “interactive local atmospheric model”. You initialize it with current data, some optionally downloaded from the internet, and then “turn it loose” to model the weather for the next few days, but with the option to interact with the program and mix in some of your own forecasting skill and knowledge.

A vast amount of work has gone into the development of WXSIM. Space does not allow a full discussion of all the program’s algorithms, but just to provide a notion of what is involved, here are some of the variables modeled or used by the program:

Date, time, sun angle, distance from sun, latitude, longitude, elevation, proximity to large bodies of water, climatological temperature and dew point data, heat capacity of the surface, latent heat of condensation, incoming shortwave solar radiation, outgoing longwave terrestrial radiation, cloud albedo and emissivity, mixing due to winds and convection, advection of temperature and dew point, upper level temperatures and dew points (in 5 atmospheric layers), formation of dew, frost, and fog, formation of sea breezes, accumulation and melting of snow, and much more.

In addition to the program’s main job of modeling/forecasting, it performs a variety of other useful functions, including:

• Conversions among temperature, dew point, relative humidity, wet bulb temperature, vapor pressure, and mixing ratio.
• Calculations of heat index and wind chill.
• Sunrise and sunset times and sunrise azimuth for any point on earth any day of the year.
• Sun altitude and azimuth at any time and date for any point on earth.
• Solar irradiance and UV index, as functions of time, place, cloud cover, haze, and fog.
• Approximate normal temperature and dew point for any point on earth on any day of the year.
• Display and limited analysis of imported and interoplated RAOB soundings (TTAA data only).
• Graphical display (with printout option) of imported and interpolated NGM and Eta FOUS forecast data, including the option of weighted averaging of the two.

WXSIM occupies a niche filled by no other program. Used properly, its forecasts are of professional quality, often as good as or better than anything else you’ll see, especially since customization allows the forecasts to be highly specific for your exact site. Its interactive nature also makes it a great learning tool, either for amatuer weather enthusiasts or meteorology students.