Welcome to my weather site. My site is located in the suburb of Fendalton, close to the  University of Canterbury in Christchurch, on the East coast of the South Island of New Zealand.  I've always had a keen interest in matters meteorological and this allied to the fact that I'm an IT Professional has led to the development of my site.

I’m using a Davis Vantage Pro2 Wireless Weather Station with an optional solar powered daytime fan which significantly improves temperature accuracy, particularly given that my station is mounted above a corrugated iron roof which has a high solar gain that would otherwise lead to unrealistically high temperature readings. In February 2007 I added solar and UV sensors.  This Davis Vantage Pro seems to be the pick of the higher-end weather stations on the market.  I'd like to offer a word of warning for potential purchasers: I bought the Vantage Pro2 with a USB data logger, which is used to transfer data from the VP2 console to a PC.  Periodically, data stopped flowing from the logger to the PC for no apparent reason.  Subsequent research on my part revealed this to be a common problem and I have now exchanged the USB data logger under warranty for the more reliable serial port data logger, which has not missed a beat since being installed.

In August 2008 I added a roof-mounted Logitech QuickCam Sphere webcam. Strictly-speaking this is an indoor webcam, but the design suggested it might be suitable for outdoor use with some careful sealing. Having overcome some USB cable length issues (5M or 16' is the maximum permissible cable length without the use of a USB extender) the camera seems to be producing reasonable results, which get uploaded to Weather Underground every 5 minutes.

If you are a regular visitor to this site you may recall that the image at the top of each page varies from time to time. I use numerous images reflecting seasons, times of day and weather types.  The site interprets the date, time and current conditions to hopefully provide a fairly realistic portrayal of actual conditions.

I owe a big "thank you" to my friend and colleague, Chris Crowe, without whom this site would not exist.  Chris wrote the MesoMap coordinate generator tool that makes life so much simpler for MesoMap users.  More recently, Chris has written a sophisticated Windows Vista weather gadget that can be downloaded here.  Chris maintains a Blog on a wide range of topics that interest him. He has recently added his own live weather page, utlizing my data.