FYI - Weather and Wind Speed

Just a helpful tip....

For some dumb reason, our local International Airport (Orlando/MCO) started sending ZERO for Wind Speed to:

myWX = Weather.getCurrentConditions();

If I rode away from home and Garmin changed to another Weather Station, I'd get valid Wind Speed. This has been a persistent issue for a couple months. I finally got the idea to try something. If I get WindSpeed == 0, I'll also attempt to get Wind Speed from:

myWX = Weather.getHourlyForecast();

This works! I overwrite myWX to save memory. MCO does send a valid Wind Speed to the [0] index (the next hour), which I pull from myWX[0].windSpeed

I'm guessing this is a one-off issue with MCO, but if you encounter a zero Wind Speed you might want to look at this work around for a misbehaving Weather Station.

mcinner1 11 months ago

myaro 11 months ago

DaveBrillhart said:
if you encounter a zero Wind Speed you might want to look at this work around for a misbehaving Weather Station.

This is an awesome tip. Thanks for sharing with the group.

jim_m_58 11 months ago in reply to myaro

The thing is, 0 could be valid for wind speed. With Garmin weather, you might only be seeing data once an hour.

With my own weather station, I can go a fairly long time with no wind (hours), and it updates every couple minutes

With Garmin Weather, keep an eye on observationTime to see how fresh the data is, and how often it updates.

It could also be an issue with the weather station Garmin is using for you. Maybe their wind sensor broke and they are waiting on a replacement..

DaveBrillhart 11 months ago in reply to jim_m_58

Exactly - that is why you ALSO check the forecast for the next hour. If the wind is legit ZERO, then the forecast won't be a much larger number. So you only override ZERO with FORECAST if FORECAST is more than say 2mph. Something like that. Or just accept a bad behaving weather station... it is a tradeoff.