Hardware siting is not website configuration. Mast height, radiation-shield exposure, and the surface under the thermometer belong in a station-metadata record. The website’s job is different: which units the visitor sees, how often the HTML is allowed to look new, which template tags the publisher fills, and which clocks are printed. Confusing those jobs produces a page that lists anemometer models when the reader needed to know whether rain is in inches or millimeters.
The historical TNET Weather URL /weather-config.php mixed equipment inventory, Weather Display intervals, and server geography into one “configuration” screen. This article keeps the URL and the configuration label. It does not treat recovered Davis-class hardware, logger intervals, or 2005 host names as a live station. Siting, sensor suite, and logger architecture are documented at station configuration as scientific metadata. What follows is the template.
Historical context
Weather Display, Cumulus, and similar publishers kept two configuration surfaces that operators often edited the same evening: the logger and instruments, and the website (unit flags, web tags, FTP, HTML refresh). Recovered copy at this URL mixed both, plus servers and network destinations. Website settings and siting metadata must not share one undifferentiated essay. TNET Weather does not claim the historical Mesa installation still runs and does not rehost Weather Display.
Display units are a publication choice
The logger may store SI internally, customary internally, or a mix. The website prints what the template is told to print. Those are not the same decision.
State the display system in one block the visitor can find without reading a forum:
- Temperature: degree Celsius or degree Fahrenheit, named.
- Wind: meters per second, kilometers per hour, miles per hour, or knots, named.
- Rain and snow: millimeters or inches, named, with the accumulation period on the same row when the dashboard shows totals.
- Pressure: hectopascals (millibars) or inches of mercury, named, and whether the figure is station pressure or a reduction to sea level.
- Solar and UV, if shown: the radiometric unit the vendor actually emits, not a decorative “sun” icon.
WMO observing practice is SI-first. U.S. public weather communication often uses mixed customary units. Either choice is legitimate on a PWS if it is consistent and labeled. Switching the wind column to knots on the live page while leaving the daily table in miles per hour is a configuration defect, not a scientific compromise.
Do not hide unit flags inside a graphics theme. A canvas gauge that omits the unit is an incomplete observation. If the template can emit both a graphic and a text row, the text row is the publication of record.
Indoor probes, if the template can print them, need an indoor label in the same configuration block. An unlabeled indoor temperature next to outdoor humidity is a visitor error waiting to happen.
Refresh is not sampling
Three clocks appear on station websites. Website configuration must name them, or the page will imply a sampling theorem it does not have.
Logger interval is how often the console or datalogger stores a sample. That belongs in siting/software metadata. Mention it on the website only as a pointer: “the logger interval is recorded on the configuration page.”
Upload interval is how often files leave the station computer for the web host. A ten-minute FTP of the full HTML and a five-second push of a compact packet are different products. If the template shows both, the website configuration should say which page uses which interval.
Page refresh is how often the browser is told to reload: a meta refresh, a scripted poll, or a manual reload. A thirty-second browser refresh of HTML that is uploaded every ten minutes does not create ten-minute physics. It creates traffic and a false sense of liveness.
A responsible template configuration therefore prints:
- the observation time inside the data file, with timezone;
- the time the HTML was last written, if that is different;
- the stated upload interval;
- whether the visible page auto-reloads, and at what cadence.
If the packet is older than a stated threshold, the honest template shows a gap, not a spinning needle. Freshness is quality control. It is the same family of problem TNET discusses conceptually as source identity and completeness in data sources, quality controls, and methodology.
Tags fill fields; they do not define climate
Weather Display, Cumulus, and related publishers replace tokens in HTML templates with values from the latest decode: temperature, humidity, wind, rain, derived indices, station name, and sometimes forecast fragments pulled from an external product. Those tokens are a contract between the software and the page. Website configuration is the list of which tokens are enabled, which page they appear on, and whether each token is observed, derived, or forecast.
Observed: the sensor value after the station software’s ordinary decode (air temperature, relative humidity, tip count converted to rain, wind speed at the anemometer).
Derived: dewpoint, wind chill, heat index, wet-bulb estimates, “feels like,” software-generated trend arrows. The NWS heat-index equation is a derived apparent temperature. Printing it in the same cell as air temperature without a label is a configuration error.
Forecast: any value valid for a later time, including an NWS period forecast included by a PHP helper. The template may show it. The configuration notes must not call it a station observation.
Do not republish a vendor’s tag dictionary here. Point operators at official Weather Display or Cumulus documentation for the installed build. Classification is the requirement, not a copied cheat sheet.
If a tag can emit a missing value, configure the template to show a missing token, not zero. A zero rain total and a missing rain total are different observations. Silent zeros are how monthly summaries lie.
Time, language, and locale
Print the timezone of the instruments, not of the web host. A page generated on an East Coast server for a Mountain Time station that omits the zone will be misread the first day daylight saving changes. Name the zone in IANA form or a well-known civil name, and state whether timestamps include daylight-saving offsets.
Date format is a locale setting, not a climate setting. ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is the least ambiguous choice for tables that might be parsed later. If the public page uses a U.S. civil format, keep it consistent and include the year.
Language of labels should match the audience. Translating “heat index” without keeping the NWS meaning attached is how a derived quantity becomes folklore.
What this page must not become
Siting. Heights, obstacle distances, pavement, fan aspiration, and WMO siting class stay on /configuration.php. Repeating them here guarantees two records that will drift.
Server geography and ISP names. Historical copy at this URL named hosting cities and a networking complex. Those are operations notes. They do not interpret a temperature. Do not put infrastructure topology on a scientific configuration page.
Network contribution as a badge. Uploading to a citizen network is a publication destination, recorded on the published-data page. It does not certify unit flags.
Live equipment marketing. A commercial family name identifies an instrument class on the siting record. It is not a reason to paste a vendor feature list into template notes.
Practical checklist
- Publish a display-unit block covering temperature, wind, rain, pressure, and any radiation sensors shown.
- Label sea-level reduction if pressure is not station pressure.
- Name observation time, HTML-written time, upload interval, and browser refresh separately.
- Classify every enabled tag as observed, derived, or forecast.
- Configure missing values to print as missing.
- Set timezone to the instruments; include DST behavior.
- Keep indoor and extra sensors labeled.
- Link siting metadata instead of duplicating it.
- Point tag syntax at current vendor documentation for the installed build.
- Review the template when the station software version changes; a new build can move a tag.
Modern relevance
Template configuration is still the difference between a site that can be quoted and a site that can only be glanced at. Units, clocks, and observed-versus-derived labels are the same distinctions a research reader needs when joining public weather records to anything else. They are not proprietary forecast logic. TNET’s account of labeled evidence families is how the service works.
The station section landing maps this page among its siblings. The visitor information sheet states location and elevation for humans. Neither page replaces this template record. The category index is the weather-station hub.
Sources
- National Weather Service: weather.gov
- NWS, heat-index equation
- World Meteorological Organization, Guide to Instruments and Methods of Observation (WMO-No. 8): library.wmo.int
- Weather Display vendor documentation: weather-display.com
- TNET, Weather station hub
- TNET, How the service works
- TNET, Data sources, quality controls, and methodology