Notes, Tips & Miscellaneous Info.
02/16/10 I added a "fun" function today. If you look on the Main Menu, there is a new entry called "Who's Online". There are two sub-menus which are "Visitor Details" and "Visitor Location Maps". If you select "Visitor Details", you will get a list of locations where people are logged onto the weather site at this time. By selection "Visitor Location Maps", you can display various maps and select various time periods to observe where people are located who have used the Soleil Weather site during a defined period of time. This is not really useful, but it is fun. I have also added additional statistics at the bottom of each page which tells how many visitors are on the site now and also the maximum number at one time for today, the month, the year, and the all time record. The records only begin with 02/16/10 of course. Hope you enjoy. Wendell
08/09/09 It's been a while since my last entry so I guess an update is in order. A couple of months ago my old computer I was using as the server for the weather website died. I started to do repairs (again) and decided to bite the bullet and replace the entire machine. It seems to be running more stable now and hopefully we will experience fewer outages. It's funny, but it only seems to go down when I am out of town, state, or country! It will run for months, then I leave and it decides to take a vacation also.
Also, you have probably noticed I changed the name of the site from Seasons at Laurel Canyon Weather to Soleil at Laurel Canyon Weather. I updated the link to Laurel Canyon Lifestyles, and most importantly I am in the process of moving the website to www.soleilweather.com. I have purchased this domain name and will start the move this coming week. I will maintain an automatic forwarding from the www.seasonsweather.com for several months. No later than April 2010, the domain of seasonsweather.com will be relinquished. PLEASE update your browsers to the new address. Thanks everyone, I hope you enjoy the weather information. Wendell
06/08/08 I made a change in the "Feels Like" temperature displayed. The previous value displayed was the Humidex temperature. This a a complex calculation involving a number of factors, but humidity has a greater weight in determining this value than in the heat index number. The Humidex is is used predominately in Canada. Here in humid Georgia, the Humidex number gives an unrealistically high value. I have changed the display to use the THSW temperature. This value is more of a true "feels like" temperature than either the Heat index or the Humidex. The THSW takes into account the ambient temperature, the humidity, the amount of solar radiation (cloud cover) and wind speed. You naturally feel cooler if there is a cloud cover and/or there is a breeze.
06/04/08 Just a couple of changes and additions. Under Almanac --> Station Graphs, I deleted the Monthly graph (it wasn't readable this small) and added a last 7 day graph. Also at the bottom of the page I added a chart of All Time Records. Of course for Laurel Canyon the records start with 4/24/08. I hopefully have corrected the display of incorrect dates. In some places the date displayed was formatted incorrectly. This problem arose because the weather program I use (Weather Display) was written by an New Zealander and all units must be converted from metric and the date from the European format.
5/27/08 We are finally back online. Windstream disconnected our phone and internet because someone entered an incorrect phone number. We were without phone Friday and Saturday and withour internet from Friday until this morning. Of course the holiday and weekend did not make things easier. Anyway, we are up again and all the data for the lost days is there. The station was still collecting information and saving on the server, it just couldn't upload it to the weather site.
5/19/2008 Just a couple of notes.. Over the past few days we have had very unstable power service. I installed an UPS (uninterrupted power supply) so that should reduce the amount of time the weather server is down due to power problems. I noticed this morning that the UPS had intervened 29 times in the past 36 hours due to voltage fluctuations or line noise.
I still have not completely worked all the problems out with the icon display and description of the current weather. This is found under "Summary /Temperature" on the home page. The picture just above the thermometer and the short description to the right of the picture. These do not always agree with the actual current weather. Please just note, if it shows rain if falling at 1 inch/hour and the little picture says clear and dry, you better believe the rain gage, not the picture!
5/12/2008 - I added this notes section today. I also added a link to NOAA under "Radar" for a very good explanation of weather radar, the different maps and thier uses as well as information about Universal Time (UT), the standard time reference used on most goverment and commerical weather sites.
This morning I realized the Laurel Canyon Weather site had not been undated since 12:20AM today. It appears we had a very brief power outage and the computer shut down. The station instruments continued to collect data and when I restarted the computer all the data for the early morning was updated. I plan to add an UPS to the server
I plan to use this section of the site to relay information about changes, updates and times when the station is down for maintance or other reasons. If you see something different or the station is not updating, check the notes section.