Wind Gust

[LAWx]

Meteobridge is set to provide RapidFire updates to Weather Underground. The Weather Underground stores the last reported gust speed every 5 minutes, but Meteobridge appears to be using a 2 minute window instead of a 5 minute window. This causes Weather Underground archive data to miss about 50% of the maximum wind gusts.

For example, if meteobridge reports a maximum wind gust of 30 mph at 00:00:00 and 19 mph at 00:04:00, Weather Underground's archive data will show the wind gust for the 00:00 - 0:05 period as 19 mph instead of 30 mph.

[admin]

When you look at the upload api description at http://wiki.wunderground.com/index.php/ ... d_Protocol you will see that WU is making use of these wind speed related data:

• windspeedmph - [mph instantaneous wind speed]
• windgustmph - [mph current wind gust, using software specific time period]
• windspdmph_avg2m - [mph 2 minute average wind speed mph]
• windgustmph_10m - [mph past 10 minutes wind gust mph ]

Meteobridge does provide those data. Time period used for windgustmph is 2 minutes. The api does not specify what time period to use, it just says "software specific" which means to me "do as you like". When all users are happy to have the max gust sticking 5 minutes, I can change to 5 minutes, but would first like to give that decision back for discussion into this forum. Are there any publications from WU saying the 5 minutes is their preferred choice?

[LAWx]

I agree that the problem really rests with WU's specification. Since they allow for arbitrary time periods they should only archive the maximum wind gust reported since the last archived data, but for some reason that's not how they do it.

I notice that my CWOP gust data is always correct. Is that calculated on a 5 minute interval instead of 2?