The Ridgewell Automatic Weather Station has been in operation since July 2005 and is located in Tilbury Green, Ridgewell, Essex. The Longitude/Latitude co-ordinates are:

     52° 02' 20" N         0° 32' 52" E

The altitude is 230 ft (approx. 70m) asl. This area of North West Essex which borders Suffolk is part of the East Anglian heights and is generally around 300 ft asl. The soil tends to be heavy clay and the area is mainly given over to arable farming. It is usually one of the direst areas of the UK.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

The Weather Station uses a Technoline (La Crosse) WS-3600. This is a popular and relatively inexpensive machine. The manufacturer has kept the cost to a reasonable level by connecting all the external sensors to a central transmitter which connects wirelessly to the main control unit. The disadvantage of this set-up is that it limits the siting and expansion of the sensors. The Wind sensor is located above roof height but several trees, particularly to the North West, may lead to some windspeed inaccuracies. The temperature and humidity sensors are located in the recommended position but the rain gauge has been positioned fairly high up to clear ground obstructions. This can lead to access difficulties when the gauge decides to  play up, which it has in 2006 when you look a the yearly rainfall totals ( so please ignore this stat ). The heavy weather software that comes with this device, although capable of displaying a multitude of instant weather information, cannot process the amount of data required to make reasonable forecasting possible. Several Weather software packages have been adapted to read the  heavy weather  data making it possible to greatly extend the usefulness of this device. I evaluated several of these  and decided on the PC-weatherstation (wswin) software. This remarkable German software automatically produces all sorts of useful graphs and data and reliably monitors the WS-3600 history file (although it does require the heavy weather  programme to be running, whereas the alternative weather-display  software does not). I have been running PC-weatherstation since August 2006. This software, along with the Webcam software, run on a home built PC with dual-core AMD processor. 

Although I hope that the weather data provided is generally accurate and near to national standards, this is only a hobby of mine so please don't plan your day on the basis of the information displayed. Due to the domestic environment that the Weather Station operates, it may be subject to unforeseen outages.  

Links to surrounding private Weather Stations

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