Brisbane LIVE Weather is a non-commercial private hobby website. It has been operating since March 2010. The instruments are located in our backyard in Cashmere, a northern suburb in Brisbane, Australia.

The Hardware



The weather station in use is the Vantage Pro2 from Davis Instruments. It is a high end, automated weather station intended for hobbyists and weather enthusiasts. The station has a solar powered daytime FARS and measures and records: wind speed and direction, inside and outside air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and rainfall.

Data is transmitted wirelessly from the sensors every 2.5 seconds to the console which is connected via usb to a laptop. The data is then recorded as a snap-shot every 5 minutes and uploaded to the web for viewing.

As well as uploading information to this website, data is also sent to the Australian Weather Network, Weather Underground and to PWS websites.

The web camera is the LifeCam 1280x720p Hi-Def WebCam from Microsoft. It is fixed to a window and faces south towards Brisbane city. Images are uploaded every five minutes.

The Software

Cumulus is an excellent, free software program by Steve Loft from Sandaysoft. It can store, record and display all the data on this website. Cumulus stores full weather records, along with daily and all-time records and presents the information via graphs, realtime instruments and text. Cumulus automatically uploads the data to your web server and comes packaged with simple web page templates to get your site up and running fast. Cumulus also supports automatic data uploads to Weather Underground, the Citizen Weather Observer Program, the Automatic Position Reporting System and the Australian Weather Network. You can download it free for personal and non-profit use.

Skymet32 is an application for METAR decoding and automatic weather map creation. A METAR is a scheduled, coded meteorological report, issued by most large and many small airports and heliports around the world. All in all there are well over 4000 METAR sources available worldwide! These compact format meteorological reports are primarily intended for pilots so that they can know the weather conditions of the airport they are landing at. Skymet will automatically download this information from the Internet, decode the current weather conditions and visualize this on a map, in a format understandable to everyone.
You can upload your weather map images to any website which supports uploading via FTP. Skymet32 runs silently in the background and will automatically refresh the weather data on the various maps and stickers as well as upload the relevant files at preset intervals. Quick access to the Skymet32 user interface is provided through its system tray icon.

We use TinCam to capture images from the webcam and FTP automatically to the server for display in the Webcam page. Images are upddated every minute and the camera operates 24/7. TinCam will update your homepage with pictures or a live video stream. It provides interval updates, scheduled updates, motion detection, live video streaming, and supports multiple cameras. You can incorporate captions and overlays into your images. It will create Web pages, FTP images automatically and act as an image server. You can have an e-mail sent on motion detection, create a picture history on a Web site and create a series of thumbnails on your Web site. TinCam allows you to rotate, sharpen or soften pictures before uploading, and records AVI videos with compression. It's not free but it is reasonably inexpensive.