WXforum.net
Weather Related Organizations => WeatherUnderground => Topic started by: AlbertArnold on January 22, 2022, 12:24:00 PM
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I happen to notice that there is a gold star medal next to my station ID - what is the purpose of this? When I go to my weather underground station site.
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It is a useless award. Drop your internet connection for 20 mins and it will be gone, have a neighboring station go haywire and you may be declared unworthy. It is suppose to mean you have been sending good data but the criteria has never been published as far as I know. Most people ignore it as totally meaningless.
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Thanks for the information.
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If it's on your drivers license, it means you have a Real ID.
Otherwise, it's useless.
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I happen to notice that there is a gold star medal next to my station ID - what is the purpose of this? When I go to my weather underground station site.
First and foremost, it is a thing that some people love to hate with a passion.
Quite some years ago, I did a bit of investigating using my data and the coming and going of the medal. As result what I say may no longer to be current, and was only an opinion anyway.
It looks like that it does comparisons of only atmospheric pressure and temperature with other stations in the area. It does not use readings such as rainfall,etc. as they are too variable in an area. For example, I can have rain in my front yard, but none in the back yard as the cloud cells go by. If you live in an area that gets "non-average" temperature variations due to gully winds or similar, then you are more likely to lose the medal even though your weather station is reporting accurately. It also means that stations with clearly defective sensors may continue to receive a gold medal if there temp and pressure are good.
It appears to use an "averaged over time" comparison and It does not appear to be run in real-time. That is, the comparison of a block of results is only run periodically. This means that a medal may appear or disappear for no immediately apparent reason.
At other times, the gold medal appears to disappear from all the local stations (perhaps, everywhere?), only to reappear later for no obvious reason. I'm kind of inclined to think that WU does their development on the live system, but I'm probably just being unkind.
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Fleeting at best. Hear today, gone tomorrow. A ghost in the machine. It is not made of gold but made of unobtanium.
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A new station has popped up next to me (miles or so away) and I've lost my gold star that I've had for a good few years now.
Interestingly, their data matches mine like for like, mine is a Davis VP and theirs is a GW1100A
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gold star medal next to my station ID.....
What is that!! :roll:I dont have a gold start many years ago. #-o :lol: :-)
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The gold star has been on my station most of the time during the 6 months since I installed it. It seems like periodically (every 5 or 6 weeks) WU will remove the star for no apparent reason, then a couple of days later it is back, again for no apparent reason.
Many of the neighboring stations in my area have badly configured pressure sensors. I am guessing they just installed the station using factory defaults and did no elevation calibration. It always surprises me to see some of these stations get a gold star, although they tend to not keep it for very long.
Well, the gold star is just a curiosity at best. I don't really care if they show it on my station or not. So far, WU has been reliable during the time I have had my station and I appreciate that.
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Interestingly, my station had a gold star consistently for the past several weeks. Then on early Monday AM this week Mediacom was doing some work on my neighbor's property and my Internet service was up and down intermittently for about 4 hours so my WS-2000 went offline several times during this outage. When my Internet service stabilized later that morning, I was not surprised to see that my gold star was gone ... that seems legitimate to me. I noticed a neighboring station about .5 miles from me lost their gold star too. IMO that neighboring station never deserved the gold star (even though it is a Davis and mine is Ambient) because they have a poorly calibrated pressure sensor. So, it has now been over 4 days with solid online connection and good quality data values for me, but the gold star has not come back. And guess what! My neighbor has it back with his same poor pressure values! It's no big deal, just kind of funny.
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The last I heard about WU "QC" :roll: (6-ish years ago) is that temperature was the only parameter they supposedly checked. Even then I considered it a joke they couldn't get right, let alone any other data. That's about the time I quit them and haven't looked back.
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Actually I found a box of these by the dumpster behind their building.
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Ya gotta take a shot once in a while!
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I stopped caring about it pretty quickly given how totally random it seems to be.
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One of my three stations I took offline because it failed had a gold star when i took it offline close to a year ago has not lost that gold star to date.
Go Figure
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Participation trophy
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As an experiment, I created 2 new "virtual" stations with locations within 1km of my existing real one. A simple program running on an esp8266 at home simply queried the real station regularly and reported the received data as if it were from the new stations, resulting in WU showing 3 stations close together showing almost identical data (allowing for processing delays), plus another real station with terrible siting and data quality.
All 3 of "my" stations achieved gold star status. The rogue station, not so much.