pywws.calib

Calibrate raw weather station data

This module allows adjustment of raw data from the weather station as part of the ‘processing’ step (see pywws.process). For example, if you have fitted a funnel to double your rain gauge’s collection area, you can write a calibration routine to double the rain value.

The default calibration generates the relative atmospheric pressure. Any user calibration you write must also do this.

Writing your calibration module

Firstly, decide where you want to keep your module. Like your text and graph templates, it’s best to keep it separate from the pywws code, so it isn’t affected by pywws upgrades. I suggest creating a modules directory in the same place as your templates directory.

You could start by copying one of the example calibration modules, or you can create a plain text file in your modules directory, e.g. calib.py and copy the following text into it:

class Calib(object):
    def __init__(self, params, stored_data):
        self.pressure_offset = float(params.get('config', 'pressure offset'))

    def calib(self, raw):
        result = dict(raw)
        # calculate relative pressure
        result['rel_pressure'] = result['abs_pressure'] + self.pressure_offset
        return result

The Calib class has two methods. Calib.__init__() is the constructor and is a good place to set any constants you need. It is passed a reference to the raw data storage which can be useful for advanced tasks such as spike removal. Calib.calib() generates a single set of ‘calibrated’ data from a single set of ‘raw’ data. There are a few rules to follow when writing this method:

  • Make sure you include the line result = dict(raw), which copies all the raw data to your result value, at the start.

  • Don’t modify any of the raw data.

  • Make sure you set result['rel_pressure'].

  • Don’t forget to return the result at the end.

When you’ve finished writing your calibration module you can get pywws to use it by putting its location in your weather.ini file. It goes in the [paths] section, as shown in the example below:

[paths]
work = /tmp/weather
templates = /home/jim/weather/templates/
graph_templates = /home/jim/weather/graph_templates/
user_calib = /home/jim/weather/modules/usercalib

Note that the user_calib value need not include the .py at the end of the file name.

Classes

Calib(params, stored_data)

Calibration class that implements default or user calibration.

DefaultCalib(params, stored_data)

Default calibration class.


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