About Latton Weather

The Site

This site was built using Firefox at a resolution of 1280x1024 and this is the optimum resolution. The layout works at 1024x768 but this is probably the minimum resolution required for reasonable presentation. The site should work with any standards compliant browser, and has been tested with IE7. However, assorted bugs (or features) in IE6 cause some minor layout issues and disappearing content on the graphs and NOAA pages. A quick wave of the cursor over the menu should allow the content to show. Other Browsers and resolutions have not been tested and may have variable results.

Weather Station

The weather station used to collect the data shown on this site is a Davis Vantage Pro2. The instruments consist of a thermometer and humidity sensor housed in a passive radiation shield, a rainfall collector and an anemometer and wind vane. A solar sensor was added in August 2008.

The sensor suite is connected, via cable, to the Davis VP2 console which has devices to provide barometric pressure together with internal temperature and humidity values. A usb datalogger is installed, which stores several day's worth of data. This is connected to a Viglen MPC-L running the weather station software and a mysql database. The database is updated every five minutes and the data on the homepage is updated every minute. Updates are sent to the Weather Underground and Weather for You web sites every five minutes.

Station History

The weather station was installed and commissioned in late January 2008. Data for the first part of January has been reconstructed from local stations for the mysql/graph data and the NOAA figures for January to avoid skewing the annual totals and averages.

Published Data

Weather data from the site is currently published on the following external sites:

Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) as DW0596

Weather Underground as IWILTSLA2

Weather for You / Personal Weather Stations as EWILATTO1 at W4U or EWILATTO1 at PWS

About Latton

Latton is a small village some 1¼ miles North of Cricklade, in Wiltshire, close to the upper Thames. It is roughly half way between the towns of Cirencester, in Gloucestershire, and Swindon, in Wiltshire. The village stood on either side of Ermin Street, linking London with Cirencester and Gloucester. The church, built or rebuilt in the 12th century and since 1763 dedicated to St. John the Baptist, stands North East of Ermin Street. The church and manor of Latton was given to Cirencester abbey by Henry I in 1133. The nave and the base of the tower survive from the 12th century and other parts of the church date from the 13th to 15th century.

At the junction of Gosditch, the lane linking the two parts of the village, and Ermin Street, a stone cross was erected sometime around the 13th century. The remaining part of this was restored in 1982. Following construction of the bypass at the end of the 20th century Ermin Street no longer forms part of the A419 main road through the parish. During the nineteenth century the canal network passed through Latton and a lock was built to connect the Thames and Severn canal with the North Wilts canal. The North Wilts, completed in 1819, formed the link between the Thames and Severn at Latton and the Wilts and Berks canal at Swindon. More information is available from the Latton Basin Heritage site.

Today, Latton consists of just over 200 houses, about 50 of them built since the completion of the bypass. Fairford RAF base, around 4 miles away to the North East, is operated by the USAF but is only used occasionally. It is used for one weekend each summer to host the Royal International Air Tattoo, during which time it becomes home to some of the world's major aerobatic teams and the busiest air base in the world. Further information on the Air Tattoo is available from the RAF Charitable Trust.

Acknowledgements

Site Templates

The site layout is based on a template from TNETWeather  

The pop out menu is from Stu Nicholls at CSSplay. The original version of the stylesheet and html is available at CSSplay.

The Thermometer display script is modified from an original script from Ken True which is available at Saratoga Weather.

The weather gauges on the homepage are modified from originals by Mark Crossley using SteelSeries JavaScript library.

The Moon rise and set times are calculated using PHP routines derived from javascript developed by Keith Burnett. See Javascript: Moon and Sun rise and set.

Software

The software to generate images and the mysql database from the Davis VP2 is weeWX 3.8.0 available at weeWX.

The graphs are generated from a mysql database using Highcharts and jpGraph Plotting libraries.

Disclaimer

Never base important decisions on this or any weather information obtained from the Internet, or on any statement made by a politician.