Ceduna Wind
Ceduna Wind
In mid-2018 a new wind sensor with no moving parts was installed at Ceduna after the demise of the previous system. The wind sensor outputs the information onto the Ceduna network as UDP packets and the python scripts MulticastCapture.py and MulticastCapturecapture.py in /home/observer on ops1cd read those packets and write the information to a log file (/tmp/windlog.txt) on ops1cd. Desktop 3 of the pcfscd:0 vnc is now dedicated for this purpose, so many of the relevant ssh terminals and scripts will be present here.
MulticastCapture.py is the original script while MulticastCapturecapture.py runs MulticastCapture.py and pipes the output into the /tmp/windlog.txt. To make sure that MulticastCapturecapture.py is working properly, and for easy monitoring of the current per/second windspeed, one can simply tail -f /tmp/windlog.txt. If this fails to update, then MulticastCapturecapture.py may not be running. Check wtih ps -ef | grep -i Multi and if no, run it with ~/MulticastCapturecapture.py on ops1cd.
The Ceduna Wind Webpages
The Ceduna wind for the last two hours can be viewed at http://ra-state.phys.utas.edu.au/cdwind.html and the wind for the last day at http://ra-state.phys.utas.edu.au/cdwind_day.html. These web pages reside on fourier.phys.utas.edu.au and use javascript to plot the data from the JSON file place in /home/www/ra-state/tmp by the ceduna_wind.pl script running on ops1cd. The javascript uses jQuery to read the JSON file and Chart.js to plot the data.
ceduna_wind.pl
This is a script which runs on ops1cd and extracts information from /tmp/windlog.txt and creates a JSON file. It also copies the .json file to fourier.phys.utas.edu.au for display on the Ceduna wind webpages. ceduna_wind.pl is located in the /home/observer, it requires the Statistical::Basic and Astro::Time perl modules installed on any system it runs on. It also needs the notastro.pm perl module available in the PERLLIB path (or that this file be in the same directory as the perl script). To copy the JSON file to fourier it requires that the private key is setup to enable scp from the observer account on ops1cd to the observer account on fourier without a password. At present ceduna_wind.pl is run by two crontab entries for the observer account on ops1cd, once every 5 minutes the 2 hour wind data is updated and once every 30 minutes the 1 day wind data is updated.
plotcdwind.py
An alternative to view the long-term wind trends at Ceduna is to go the the 3rd desktop of the pcfscd:0 vnc and run ~/plotcdwind.py which will make a quick and dirty plot of the windspeed over the last 5 hours.