The Hessle Website

The History of the Hessle Weather Project


The Hessle Weather Project was conceived in 2009 as a retirement project.  The author retired in 2010 and the weather station was subsequently purchased in 2011.  At that time, the weather station was located in Astwood Bank, Worcestershire.  The Weather Station, a Davis Vantage Pro2, was installed in May 2011 and began collecting data on April 12. The first full month's records begin in May 2011.

The original concept of the project was to record detailed weather data and look for patterns or other scientifically important characteristics associated with the data.  The concepts of random data sequences and fractal characteristics were initial lines of investigation and, to this end, the data were collected at 5-minute intervals, a practice that was continued until the end of 2015. Data were extracted on a monthly basis and summarised to record various characteristics for each day of the month.

The following year a a paper was produced, so far unpublished, about the weather station project.  I will publish that paper on this website, although the intention is to include its contents in a more comprehensive paper at a later date.

In December 2013, the station closed down in preparation for the move to Hessle. The move took longer than expected and the station was not recommissioned until June of the following year. The first full month's record for the new location was July 2014, since when it has been recording weather data continually.

At the end of 2015, the PC that collected and displayed the data was shut down for a period of fifteen days. Because 5-minute data would fill the data logger buffer in about 8 days, the data collection interval was increased to 15-minutes prior to the shut down. The experience over the preceding four years indicated that there would be negligible degradation in the resultant processed data.

The Weather Bulletin was the first page to be commission on this website, commencing broadcasting on July 21, 2016.