About This Website
This website was created for the residents of Suntree, Florida to provide local weather data and forecasts. The weather station is privately owned and operated and the data should not be used for official weather information.
About Suntree, Florida
Suntree is a planned community in Brevard County, Florida, United States. It is unincorporated. It is located near the center of the county, off Interstate 95 (I-95) near Viera between I-95 and the Florida East Coast Railroad. It lies approximately halfway between Rockledge and Melbourne. The population was 20,194 at the 2000 census.
About the Weather Station at Sawgrass Key
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The weather station at Sawgrass Key is a Davis Vantage Pro2™. The exterior sensor unit shown at the left consists of a solar powered suite of sensors that measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and wind direction. The electronic components, including the wireless transmitter, are located in a weather-resistant shelter under the solar panels. For improved accuracy, temperature and humidity sensors are housed inside a daytime fan-aspirated radiation shield. The shield protects against solar radiation and other sources of radiated and reflected heat and the fan provides airflow across the sensors. The rain gauge is an automatic tipping bucket type. The temperature, humidity and rainfall sensors are mounted on a 4 x 4 wooden post about 5-6 feet above the grass. The wind sensors (cup anemometer and wind vane) are mounted about 25 feet above ground level on a stainless steel mast secured to the side of our swimming pool screen room enclosure. |
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The interior console unit shown at the left measures barometric pressure, indoor temperature and humidity and receives the data wirelessly from the exterior sensor suite. A data logger attached to the console sends the sensor data to a PC for processing by Weather Display software. The data logger is connected to the PC via a USB cable and downloads the data in real time to the Weather Display software running on the PC. The data logger also stores the data which can be retrieved by Weather-Display at a later time if the real time download is interrupted. |
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The Weather Display software then sends the data to this web site as well as the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) (unique identifier is CW4018), NOAA's Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS), the Weather Underground and the Southeastern Weather Network. The original weather station computer was a spare system built from scratch in 2002 running Windows XP Home. It had an AMD 64 bit processor running at 1.3 GHz and only 512 MB RAM. When the motherboard died in 2008, it was replaced with an HP Slimline S3220N running Windows Vista Home Premium SP2. The HP computer has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ 2.60 GHz with 2 GB RAM running on an APC 550VA Back-UPS. A minimum amount of software is installed on this system and it is primarily dedicated to the weather station. |
Page 31 of the CWOP Weather Station Siting, Performance, and Data Quality Guide contains a table called "Determining Optimal Sensor Siting for Your Location". The table provides a method to score the optimal location of a weather station based on several factors. The Sawgrass Key weather stations scored 25 out of 30. The less than perfect score is due to the limited availability to properly position the wind sensors.
| Sensor | Optimal Sensor Location | Sawgrass Key Location | CWOP Score |
| Wind speed and direction | 32 feet above ground. No obstructions. | Mounted on a stainless steel mast 25 feet above ground. Trees are below sensor level. Roof apex above sensor to the southwest. | 5 of 10 |
| Temperature and Humidity | In open, 5 feet above grass. | In open, 5 1/2 feet above grass mounted on 4 x 4 post. | 10 of 10 |
| Rainfall | In open, 2 feet above grass. | In open, 6 feet above grass mounted on 4 x 4 post. | 10 of 10 |
| The weather station is located at: |
| Latitude: 28° 12' 4" N (deg min sec), 28.2010° (decimal), 2812.06N |
| Longitude: 80° 42' 20" W (deg min sec), -80.7056° (decimal), 08042.33W (LORAN) |
| Elevation: 10 meters (32 feet) |
The original design of this website is based on:
A template design by CarterLake.org with PHP conversion by Saratoga-Weather.org.
Special thanks go to Kevin Reed at TNET Weather for his work on the original Carterlake templates, and his design for the common website PHP management.
Special thanks to Mike Challis of Long Beach WA for his wind-rose generator, Theme Switcher and CSS styling help with these templates.
Special thanks go to Ken True of Saratoga-Weather.org for the AJAX conditions display, dashboard and integration of the TNET Weather common PHP site design for this site.
Template is originally based on Designs by Haran.
This template is XHTML 1.0 compliant. Validate the XHTML and CSS of this page.
