Is My Weather Station Online? | 5 Reasons to Check
- May 26, 2020
Your professional grade weather station from Earth Networks is the best on the market… as long as it’s running!
Is Your Weather Station Running?
There’s an old joke that goes something like this:
Q: “Is your refrigerator running?”
A: “Yeah…”
Q: “Then you better go catch it!”
Don’t worry – this post isn’t a set up for a joke like that (weather stations can’t run anyway!) In fact, this post is a serious reminder about the importance of ensuring your weather station is online.
If you don’t need convincing, click here to learn how to check if your station is online now.
Why Do Weather Stations Go Offline?
Our expert field technicians take a lot of time ensuring weather station installs are perfect. If you watched them during the installation, you probably saw them scope out your area. They maybe even discussed with you the best places for the weather station to sit. Then they went to work carefully installing the station and making sure all the wires were hooked up soundly.
The thing is: there are a lot of things that can happen after our field techs leave that can cause a station to go offline. This includes everything from technical issues to wildlife messing with the equipment itself.
Why Is It Bad If My Station Goes Offline?
When a station is “down” or goes “offline,” that means it’s no longer sending data to our hyperlocal weather network.
In the simplest of terms, that means your organization isn’t receiving the awesome, commercial grade weather data you’re used to. No more real-time temperature, dew point, wind speed, direction, or any of the many other data points our weather stations report on. It doesn’t take a meteorologist to see the problem with that!
Not only will you miss out on this important data, but our entire Earth Networks family suffers as well. While your weather station might not always be on the top of your priority list (trust us, we get it!), it’s extremely important for you and the rest of our Earth Networks family that you let us know about offline stations. That way, our support staff can get to work troubleshooting or repairing.
5 Reasons to Check Your Weather Station is Online
Why is it so important that your weather station stays online? These are the five biggest reasons you should regularly check that your weather station is up and running.
1. Get Weather Data for Your Organization
This has to be the most obvious reason behind checking on your weather station. It doesn’t matter if your station was a gift, purchased with a grant, or saved for over the years. You deserve the real-time weather data it should provide.
If your station is offline, you can’t use its real-time data to complete important weather-related tasks, like:
- Prepare for severe weather
- Protect people and property
- Automate and streamline your operations.
First and foremost, having an online weather station benefits you and your organization. That’s the biggest reason you should make sure it’s online!
2. Help National Forecasters
Did you know that our weather network is composed over 17,500+ weather stations, including yours? Since our stations are so dense and precise, forecasters from the National Weather Service (NWS) and some of your favorite news channels rely on it for observing real-time weather conditions and forecasting conditions that could impact people’s lives.
If one station out of the 17,500+ is offline, it normally isn’t a big deal…right?
But what if that station is somewhere remote? What if that station is in a storm-prone area and typically helps forecasters predict and monitor life-threatening tornadoes? How about if dozens or even hundreds of weather stations are out at once?
Ensuring your weather station is online is a simple task that has a huge national impact. Help out the top meteorologists of the country and make sure yours isn’t a problem!
3. Keep Emergency Managers Safe
Our weather network really takes the bigger picture into account. There are hundreds of emergency managers around the country that rely on our weather network to protect their communities and plan around everything from thunderstorms to hurricanes.
Similarly to our second point, ensuring your station is plugged in and hooked up helps these emergency managers make better weather-related decisions. These aren’t decisions that could make influence morning news watchers planning their days. The decisions that emergency managers make are life and death.
- Should we evacuate this flood zone and when?
- Is it safe to allow our crews to perform rescues?
- How long do we have before the next storm hits?
In today’s day and age, our emergency management heroes need our help more than ever. Do your part by just checking your weather station. Even if you aren’t nearby, you can use the internet to check in just a few minutes.
4. Connect Your Community
A lot of organizations use their weather stations to connect their community. Whether the local news gets their weather data from your station or members of your city just like to check the online weather center, your weather station is a hub for your community. If it’s down, your community members won’t know the conditions or they might even complain to you.
If they do complain that your station is down, they’re really doing you a favor! Now you know your station is down. All you have to do next is just let our support staff know, or try the three quick troubleshooting tips below. We really recommend you reach out to our support staff, though. They don’t bite!
5. Get the Most Value
No matter when or how you obtained your professional-grade weather station from Earth Networks, you’re in possession of one incredible piece of hardware. These weather stations deliver several real-time data points that help you understand what Mother Nature is up to so you can plan and react accordingly.
Whether you just have a weather station or have an entire suite of Earth Networks monitoring and alerting products, having your weather station online is key for getting the most value out of your weather solution. It doesn’t matter if you love the station or not, either (don’t worry, you won’t hurt our feelings). It still makes sense to have it online. If you’re not loving your station, well that’s just another reason to reach out to our support staff. We’re here for you!
So – Is Your Weather Station Online and Running?
Well, you better go catch it!
We know, we know – we promised you we wouldn’t do that, but we couldn’t resist. We could all use a laugh in these crazy times.
But in all seriousness: you really should know if your station is online. Now that you understand how important keeping your weather station online is, it’s time to check your status! You can do this by contacting our support staff.
Better yet, if you know your station’s unique 5-letter ID, you can check your station status by adding it to the end of the URL below (after the = sign)
http://enpd.us/wx.asp?id=
Quick Troubleshooting Steps
If your weather station is offline, you can contact our support staff today and they will help you get it back up and running. If you prefer to talk on the phone, you can also give us a call at 1-800-624-4205.
In the meantime, check out these three troubleshooting tips:
- Power: Verify the power is on and all of the cable connections secure
- Internet: Check the internet connectivity. You can do this by making sure the weather station is connected to the internet via an Ethernet cable
- Reboot: Turn the indoor weather station equipment off and back on to allow the system to reboot
Thanks!
Did you make it this far in the post? Thanks for reading, and thanks for taking the time to understand why keeping your weather station online is so critically important. In times like these, it’s important that we stick together and help each other out.
If you have a question about any of your Earth Networks solutions, please reach out to us and let us know. We’d love to connect and ensure you’re getting the most value out of your weather station, mobile alerts, or any other product you might be using!
Email us at support@earthnetworks.com or call the support team at 1-800-624-4205 to get started! You can also use the pretty buttons below to contact us in your preferred method:
