Garmin Weather Pull Frequency

Interesting.... I wanted to see how often I get refreshed info from my local weather station. I know the one I get here is MCO - Orlando International Airport (from before Garmin removed the station name). But I thought the refresh rate was much more frequent. This was on a 90 min ride.... Apparently the OBSERVATION TIME is the time the weather station refreshed their data, not the time it was made available to the data field. GOOD! Because my first reading (pull) was almost immediately at EDGE 1050 boot time and the data was over 2600 seconds (43 mins) old already. The first refresh I got. about 20 mins into my ride, the data was already 6 mins old. And the next refresh was 70 mins later, at which point the weather data was 1 hr 20 mins old.

I'm not entirely sure if the almost 1.5 hour old data before that 2nd refresh is a Garmin imposed poll frequency rate to limit traffic, or the airport weather station tags the data with an Observation Time and only updates their data every hour or so?

jim_m_58 3 days ago

I have the option to display the observationTime. I'm in Phoenix and the weather source is Sky Harbor.

I never see updates more often than every hour, and sometimes 2 hours. Always from 51 minutes after the hour. Garmin weather is often off based on where I am vs the airport even right after an update.

With OWM and WU I control how often weather is updated which can be as often as every 5 minutes. With WU, I can see data from my own back yard or the closest weather station - There are maybe 10 within a couple miles of my house. With OWM, I alternate between 2 weather stations, both within maybe 5 miles from me.

DaveBrillhart 2 days ago in reply to jim_m_58

I had a user show me his FIT graph... much better in his area, with refreshes every 20 mins, and at refresh time, the observation time is near real time. So my guess is Garmin looks for new data every 20 mins, but the weather station tags their data with the last update on their side, so often for lazy stations, the 20 min poll doesn't have new data.

DaveBrillhart 2 days ago in reply to jim_m_58

I may switch to that. If you grab data from multiple stations, do you find it beneficial to average values like temp, wind speed and direction? Do those two stations near you generally in alignment?

jim_m_58 2 days ago in reply to DaveBrillhart

I don't grab data from multiple stations at the same time. With WU it's always a specific station, which can change based on my location. I get GPS and then get the station closest to that.

With OWM there's temp_min and temp_max which are the min/max for nearby stations at the same time. and typically very close to the temperature I see from the main station.