Round Rock Weather Station

Shameless Plug

About This Station

The station is powered by a Davis Instruments VantagePro 2 Plus weather station with a Fan Aspirated Radiation Shield. The data is collected every 2.5 seconds and the site is updated every 5 minutes. A new and unique software configuration is in use at the station. First, we utilize the very innovative Virtual VP software from the VP Tools suite. This application allows the sharing of one com port (in my case, a USB port using a software driver to emulate a com port) by up to four software applications by creating four virtual com ports. The weather software applications in use incude WxSolution, used as the primary weather processing software, for web page uploads, the outstanding Local Climatological Data reports, uploads to Weather For You and for performing "Rapid Fire" updates to Weather Underground, Weather Display for additional graphing, capturing of NWS watches and warnings, and e-mail weather reports and alarms, and AWEKAS, the outstanding freeware application Cumulus from Sandaysoft, Virtual Weather Station, Weather Display, and last, but by no means least, the outstanding freeware application VP Live (also part of the VP Tools suite) for increasing the default 15-minute barometer update to once per minute for for completely proper updates to the Citizen Weather Observer Program, where data from my station and over 3000 others worldwide is used by the National Weather Service for improving forecast modeling and for many other purposes. The station is comprised of an anemometer, rain gauge, barometer, solar radiation sensor, UV sensor, thermometer, and humidity sensor situated in optimal positions for highest accuracy possible.

Our webcam is a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000, and our webcam images are processed using the outstanding Image Salsa software. The weather computer is from Hewlett-Packard, and our internet service is provided by Time-Warner Cable/Road Runner High Speed Online. Internet hosting is provided by 1&1 Internet; we've been extremely pleased with both their service and pricing for some time now.

About Round Rock

In 1851 a small community was formed on the banks of Brushy Creek, near a large round rock located in the middle of the creek. This round rock marked a convenient low-water crossing for wagons, horses and cattle. The first postmaster called the community Brushy Creek, but in 1854 the small settlement was renamed Round Rock in honor of this now famous rock. The "round rock" is located near Chisholm Trail Street in the middle of Brushy Creek. After the Civil War, Jesse Chisholm began to move cattle from South Texas through Round Rock, on the way to Abilene, Kansas. The route he established, which crossed Brushy Creek at the round rock became known as the Chisholm Trail. Most of the old buildings, including the old Saint Charles Hotel are still there today. This historic area is now called "Old Town".

Downtown Round Rock is the site of the gunfight and subsequent capture (then death) of the nineteenth-century American train robber, Sam Bass, by the Texas Rangers on July 19, 1878. The event is known locally as the "Sam Bass Shootout". Bass is buried in Round Rock Cemetery, located northwest of "Old Town" on Sam Bass Road. For reasons unknown, Alijah ("A.W.") Grimes, a Williamson County Deputy Sheriff shot and killed by Bass is little acknowledged in the area; one road in Round Rock is named after Deputy Grimes, and a small plaque exists at the Round Rock Police Department honoring Grimes. Sam Bass, on the other hand, has many things named after him, including a major road, a fire department, and an annual festival.

The infamous gunslinger, outlaw, (and eventual attorney - or is that redundant?) John Wesley Hardin attended Professor Landrum’s Academy in Round Rock.

Infamous confidence man, Soapy Smith lived in Round Rock and claimed to have witnessed the Sam Bass shootout. It was in this city that Soapy started his criminal career.

Round Rock is home to the Round Rock Express, owned by Nolan Ryan and his family, the Triple-A team for the Houston Astros, who play their home games at the Dell Diamond. Located around Dell Diamond is Old Settlers Park, a large multi-use park with trails, numerous ballfields, soccer fields, a flying field for radio controlled aircraft and home field for the Lone Star Aeronuts, a "disc golf" course, a fishing lake, and a city-owned water park.

In 2006, Money magazine rated Round Rock as #48 of the best 100 places to live in the United States. The city is also ranked, by some measures, as the 13th safest city in the United States.

Round Rock, Williamson County and perhaps Central Texas at large, is the only area, probably in the United States, and possibly the world, where there are more CVS and Walgreen's pharmacies than there are Starbucks. Often, you'll find a CVS on one corner and Walgreens on another at the same intersection. This also seems to be commonplace with Lowe's and Home Depot as well; as an example, there is a Lowe's under construction in nearby Hutto that is directly across the street from an established Home Depot.

Round Rock Links

Round Rock at the Handbook of Texas Online

City of Round Rock

Blog on pretty much what really happens politically here in Williamson County...

Round Rock Page at the Williamson County Historical Museum

About This Website

This site's look and feel, as well as much of the external content, would not be possible without the help and talents of a number of extremely skilled and generous people. In no particular order, I offer my extreme gratitude to a number of folks in the weather community:

Ken True of Saratoga Weather for his wonderful PHP scripts. These include that used to display watch/warning information, forecasts, and the AJAX scripts that allow "static" pages to display dynamic data in near real time. Ken was also instrumental in reviving my former weatherforum.net into it's current iteration as wxforum.net, and he has made it a much more friendly, attractive, and useful resource to weather hobbyists (and some professionals!) worldwide.
Steve at SoftWX, developer of the outstanding Virtual VP and VP Live software. Virtual VP allows up to four weather station software applications to share the data feed from a single serial (or USB port operating as a virtual serial port). This has long been the "Holy Grail" of personal weather station operators!
Graeme Kates of Arthur's Pass, New Zealand, for his creation of FWI Calculator, a software application that calculates the Fire Weather Index based upon data from a personal weather station, which he makes freely available. My data can be seen here.
Tom at CarterLake.org for the templates used on many of these pages as well as his scripts, some of which Ken (above) has tweaked into their current iteration.
Dan Hansen at Thunderhead Technologies for WxSolution, Brian Hamilton, creator of Weather Display, Ed Edelman, creator of Virtual Weather Station software, and the nameless folks at Davis Instruments for the wonderful VantagePro and VantagePro 2 weather stations and WeatherLink software.