Initial fears that the AWS at the SSC Hut had been damaged by the wind (it was recording wind speeds of 88mph shortly before loss of data - and the wind had been gusting to 165mph at the Summit) proved unfounded and the data feed restored shortly after 4pm on Saturday.

The AWS sensors are wired together but not currently hard-wired to the console/computer and thus the sensors are running on battery power. It looks as if the wild weather was shaking the temperature sensor so much that the batteries were failing to make contact all the time and after a certain number of drop outs the Console gives up attempts to communicate to preserve it’s own batteries.

Hard wiring the set-up will give more frequent wind measurements (thus we expect more accurate as the AWS stands a better chance of recording higher gusts) but as the system was primarily installed for temperature and humidity data an element of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ makes me wary of changing the set-up at this stage.

As of yesterday evening the Automatic Weather Station has been unable to connect to the external sensors. This will be investigated later.

Webcams have been restored to 4 minute updates since mid-week and are updating 45mins before sunrise till 25minutes after sunset. This should ensure a reasonably bright last image is up all evening/night, but ensure the first images are out as soon as there is sufficient light for the cameras to function. You can check 6 images from the past hour as well as an archive for the last 10 hourly images on the webcam page at www.winterhighland.info/testcam .