Posting an update after the first full day of decent winds here since WUHU switch.
The winds stayed light and variable during the morning under a pesky inversion and thick cloud cover, but the sun came out this afternoon, and some gusty winds mixed down. I had a couple gusts to 22 at the station this afternoon.
Now for the WUHU obs analysis. First off, the wind direction consistency has been awesome this afternoon with the gusty winds. The benefit of having a 20-min avg wind direction, as opposed to a 2-min avg, is definatley pretty significant. Sustained speeds have been solid, too- no problems there at all.
I hate to say, but I have had some problems with gusts being uploaded to WU today. Now, this gust problem doesn't mean the problem has to be associated with WUHU itself. In capturing those brief, 2.5-second gusts, I would think even a computer lag would cause problems- and the wx comp I use is old and laggy. It could be anything. Regardless of the cause, the gusts shown on my Wunderground data are not always representative of the actual highest gust during some of the intervals. For example, there was a 20 mph gust at around 12:20 PM that was, for whatever reason, not represented in the WU upload. Instead, the highest gust during that interval is listed as being 16 mph on WU. The same happened with a gust to 21 at around 2:30 PM. The WU upload indicated a peak gust of only 20 during this interval. In addition, a gust to 22 at around 5:15 PM was not shown on WU; the highest gust for that interval is shown as being only 19 mph. I cite these examples since they were obvious to me when comparing the CWOP data (uploaded by WxSolution) w/the WU data, but there likely were other instances where the peak gust was a bit under-represented.
It does seem like the problem is in the communication between the Davis and WUHU. For whatever reason, I've never had any missed gusts on WeatherLink or WxSolution in over 2 years of operation; Gary Oldham does note in his reviews that those two programs are top of the line for capturing every single data packet. Like I said before, maybe my computer is the reason why WUHU doesn't seem to always pick up the peak gusts. Or, could it be back to reporting just the 10-min gust? I have no idea what the problem is, but after all that wuhu_software has done to update the application, I wouldn't be surprised if this was something wrong w/my computer, or the signal coming from my Davis, etc. In the WUHU log, I get an error message that says "failed to retrieve weather data from the console" every hour or so, although that messgae doesn't seem to correlate in any way with the missed peak gusts. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the culprit here.
