Current Ely weather reports

Please follow this link if you simply want to see the latest Ely weather report. The description below is intended for people interested in seeing and understanding the various different types of web page weather reports that the Davis Weatherlink software can offer.

These pages show some working examples of the different types of graphical Weatherlink weather reports. You can see the current and recent Ely weather presented in two distinct sections using different layouts. Both sections use data generated by a standard installation of the Weatherlink software and so are intrinsically different from the experimental presentations shown elsewhere on this site. The two sections below show (i) default data presentations and (ii) custom presentations.

Default Weatherlink presentations

These 'default' presentations are examples of weather reports that will work 'out of the box'. In other words, more or less as soon as the Weatherlink software has been installed and successfully connected to the weather station, the software can be set to generate these web pages automatically. There are a couple of steps necessary to enter the settings associated with configuring the data handling and uploading to your website, but absolutely no web page design is required to get these particular pages live. Instead, suitable web page templates are installed along with the Weatherlink software and these are used to generate and automatically refresh the web pages containing the live weather data.

There are two main templates that can be used, which generate the pages shown in the following examples:

Current Vantage Pro, which shows mainly data dealing with the here and now;
Vantage Pro 'History', which predominantly shows trends in recent weather

NB There are actually different template files for the various models of Davis weather station, because the data to be presented will vary with the number and type of sensors fitted to a given station. The examples here relate to the standard Vantage Pro 2 model.

Note that a small degree of flexibility is possible even with the standard templates as to the exact look and content of some of the graphic images. So it is possible, for example, to add maximum/minimum indicators to the tank graphics or to change the background colour and duration of trend graphs, because these values are set within the Weatherlink software itself rather than in the templates. A few other details such as the ticker display can also be customised.

But, in general, the layout and content of web pages created from the standard Weatherlink template files is largely fixed, although the standard layouts of the default web pages described above are more than satisfactory for many common weather reporting applications, It is however also possible for anyone with some basic knowledge of web page design to modify the templates used here or indeed to create new web pages and templates completely from scratch, as outlined in the next section.

Custom Weatherlink web pages

Custom web pages can be written that use the basic weather-reporting elements of standard Weatherlink templates to present the weather readings but in a selection and layout.that is fully under the control of the web page designer. These custom designs can therefore look either partly or completely different from the standard templates and so offer a lot of scope for customisation and personalisation.of the weather-reporting web pages.

If you've looked in detail at the Current Vantage Pro page mentioned above, you may have noticed that there are three separate types of elements that are used to present data in the standard templates:

First there are simple text values. For example, a line of text on a web page might say:

The current outside temperature is 22.4deg C.

(This is an example, not a live value by the way)

The current temperature value (22.4 in this example) is updated to reflect the latest available reading every time the page is refreshed, which might typically be say every 5 or 10 minutes. All the normal rules of HTML for web page composition apply and can be used, so that the text elements can be styled, placed inside tables etc as required.

Second, are so-called 'tank' graphics as shown on the left here. (The graphic is in the general shape of a transparent tank of liquid whose level indicates the current reading, much as in a glass thermometer.)

These images show the current value of a parameter relative to a fixed Y-axis scale and are intended to provide an instant visual indication of the current level of a particular reading. This type of graphical presentation is available for very many of the wide range of weather parameters that a Vantage Pro 2 weather station is capable of measuring.

Optionally (and as shown here), marker bars can be added to this graphic showing the maximum and minimum values recorded so far in the current day for the weather parameter in question.

At the foot of the graphic (but as an integral part of the image) is a text caption showing the current reading as a text value plus a date/time stamp showing when the graphic was last updated.

Both these tank graphics and the trend graphs discussed below are generated by Weatherlink as image files in standard gif format, which gives a good sharp appearance while minimising the image file size. It is these image files that contain the current weather information for each parameter, the HTML template file merely providing a space and location for displaying the image. It is important to ensure that the appropriate image files are being created and uploaded to the web server, which is additional to the uploading of the template file itself.

The third type of element is the trend graph (see right).Whereas the previous tank graphics show an instant or spot reading, trend graphs are used to show how the reading for a given weather parameter has been varying over the a recent period, always showing the latest reading as the last point on the graph.

The time-span covered by the trend graph can be chosen from a range of preset values, ranging from one hour up to one year, but typically a time-span of from one to seven days will be most useful in presenting recent weather data in an easily-read format. Again, trend graphs can be generated for very many of the weather parameters that are measured or calculated by Weatherlink, including derived parameters such as dew point and also readings from supplementary sensors. In general, all of the trend graphs generated will cover the same time-span, although there is a way - by using more than one upload profile - of generating sets of graphs covering two or more different time-spans.

So, creating a custom web page template can vary from making a specific or limited edit to an existing template file right through to creating a new web page design completely from scratch. Examples of both are shown below.

In the first example, which involves just a simple modification to an existing template, we show the result of substituting a sunshine intensity tank graphic and trend graph for the wind speed and direction graphic elements in the Current Vantage Pro template;
The second example shows the potential for designing a completely new web page template. Although this still uses the familiar Weatherlink text and graphic elements, the design , layout and additional content of the page was developed from scratch.