About This Station

This Personal Weather Station (PWS) and website are operated and supported by Penn State Extension Master Gardeners of Cumberland County volunteers and began operations on September, 2 2013.

This website was created to help the Master Gardeners better support the Allen Road Demonstration Gardens, located at 310 Allen Road, Carlisle, PA and as a public educational service to our fellow gardeners, our local community and visitors to our region.

* Member of:

The station is located at the Penn State Extension Cumberland County Office Building site on Allen Road, Carlisle, PA USA :

The station is powered by:

Software used:

Local weather data is collected real-time by the Davis Wireless ISS weather station comprised of an anemometer, rain gauge, and thermo-hydro sensors, situated in optimal positions for highest accuracy possible, and connected to a wireless data transmitter.

Data is transmitted every 2.5 seconds, where the signals are received by a central base station (Console/Receiver) which is connected via a USB cable to a computer at the Penn State Extension Cumberland County offices. It is then immediately processed by Weather-Display, a specialized weather station software application, running under Microsoft XP. Files of data and web page templates are then uploaded every 10 seconds to 5 minutes over a broadband connection to the MechanicsburgWeather.com website, hosted at GoDaddy.com. Data is also uploaded to the Weather Underground and CWOP.

The Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) is a private-public partnership with three main goals:

  1. to collect weather data contributed by citizens;
  2. to make these data available for weather services and homeland security; and
  3. to provide feedback to the data contributors so that they have the tools to check and improve their data quality.
The integrity of the collected weather data is monitored throughout the day and compared with other reporting stations in the area by CWOP. Data is accurate and within the deviations seen by nearby reporting stations.