Why choose South Bergen Weather?

SealWhy is South Bergen Weather better than weather.com or accuweather.com? Aren't they more convenient? Don' the have reliable information? The answer is no. Sites like accuweather.com and weather.com have to provide weather data for the whole country. Firstly, this means that instead of focusing their efforts to provide the best quality data for one area, they have the whole country to manage. Because we cover only one area, we care about getting it right. That's why we provide every kind of weather map, weather index, and weather measurement we can think of. Try to go to weather.com or accuweather.com and find all of the data we supply to you. It just won't be there. Secondly, sites like weather.com take their data from specialized weather stations called METARs (official weather reporting sites), which are usually only located at airports. This is fine if you live next to the airport, but what if you don't? That's where South Bergen Weather fills in the gap, providing you with the weather data that's pratically happening in your own backyard. Another problem lies in the fact that most METARs update only once an hour! That means thunderstorms could roll in and out before you get any updated weather information! This will not happen with South Bergen Weather! Conditions are updated on the site every 10 seconds, providing weather data LIVE, as it happens. Now that you have been given the facts, we hope you will choose South Bergen Weather as your weather source.

Do you have a suggestion for South Bergen Weather? If so, tell us!

About This Station

Weather Station

The station is powered by a Davis Vantage Vue weather station. The data is collected every 2.5 seconds (wind) and every 10 seconds (everything else) and the site is updated every 10 seconds. This site and its data is collected using Cumulus Weather Display Software. Because of this software change, logfiles from January 4, 2012 to January 25, 2013 are currently unavailable. The station is comprised of an anemometer, a rain gauge and a thermo-hydro sensor situated in optimal positions for highest accuracy possible. The thermo-hygro sensor is placed in a white solar radiation shield to mitigate the effects of the sun. The anemometer is located around 25 feet in the air on top of a garage. Wind measurements are affected minorly due to a tree about 30 feet north and possibly another tree 120 feet to the south. The anemometer is otherwise unobstructed. The rain gauge is located on top of the garage, about ~25 feet in the air and is secured in place to avoid faulty tips. All of these sensors are located in one Integrated Sensor Suite. The station went online on March 28, 2014 and is fairly new.

Using table 8 of the CWOP Weather Station Siting, Performance, and Data Quality Guide, the overall score for the siting of our sensors amounts to a 16 out of 30. While there are various obstructions and a small number of possible mounting sites, the weather station is currently situated in the best possible location given the constraints of a suburban environment.
Sensor Optimal location Our location CWOP Score
Wind speed and direction

32' above ground. No obstructions

Sensor 3' above roof, approx 25' above ground 7 of 10
Temperature and Humidity In open, 5 feet above grass. Shielded temperature/humidity sensor located 3' above roof, 25' above ground. 4 of 10
Rainfall In open, 2 feet above grass. Located 3' above roof, 25' in the air. 5 of 10

Lightning Detector

Lightning Detector

The lightning detector used by South Bergen Weather is a 1-Wire board purchased from Hobby Boards. 1-Wire is a protocol developed that allows the user to daisy chain devices together, using just one wire (an ethernet or phone cable). The board uses the antenna to pick up strokes of lightening by listening for interference. This is the same static you hear on AM radio during a thunderstorm. The antenna is approximately 24" long, made out of copper wire. While unusual, it can sometimes record nearby interference as a false strike. The ground wire is connected to a metal rod buried 4' deep in the ground to help mitigate any interference.

About This City

Skycam Image

The weather station is located in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey. It is a small city about 1 mile across located in southern Bergen County. It is located within 15 miles of New York City. Please refer to the Wood Ridge History Page for more information.

Area Served by South Bergen Weather


Map of served areas
Orange = NJ | Green= NYC | Blue = NY State

Acknowledgements

This site is a template design by CarterLake.org with PHP conversion by Saratoga-Weather.org.
Special thanks go to Kevin Reed at TNET Weather for his work on the original Carterlake templates, and his design for the common website PHP management.
Special thanks to Mike Challis of Long Beach WA for his wind-rose generator, Theme Switcher and CSS styling help with these templates.
Special thanks go to Ken True of Saratoga-Weather.org for the AJAX (realtime) conditions display, dashboard and integration of the TNET Weather common PHP site design for this site.
Special Thanks go to Anole Computer Services for the program used to generate the weather stickers
Cloudbase graphic courtesy of Bashewa Weather

Template is originally based on Designs by Haran.

This website is powered by a collection of various scripts and templates mostly coded by webmasters of other similar PWS sites, who generously choose to share these scripts with others. These scripts enable the site to be extremely dynamic, yet still fully autonomous, accomplishing tasks such as automatically fetching the air quality reading or updating river heights without requiring any manual input. Without these fellow webmasters, this website would not come close to being as informative as it is now. A special thanks also goes to the various providers of data for this website, including, but not limited to: Wunderground, NOAA/National Weather Service, Temis.nl(UV Index Forecast), and Air Now (Air Quality). These organizations generously allow South Bergen Weather to collect data from them and display it on our site free of charge, allowing us to provide the most detailed weather information that would otherwise be very difficult and/or costly to bring together in one place. Therefore, a special thank-you is extended to both those programmers whose scripts power this site, and to our data providers which help to greatly enhance South Bergen Weather. You can find many of these scripts distributed over at Saratoga Weather Scripts and Legacy Scripts

This template is XHTML 1.0 compliant. Validate the XHTML and CSS of this page.

About this Site

Thank you for visiting! Established on April 4, 2012, South Bergen Weather was meant to be a source to view current conditions from a privately owned weather station (Personal Weather Station, or PWS) on the internet. Now, having evolved into your one stop site for the weather, we pride ourselves in maintaining the highest quality weather site. Based in Wood Ridge, Bergen County, NJ, we provide our data for all of the New York City metropolitan area. You can see a map of the areas we serve above. This site is a continous project, and new pages are added all the time. Suggestions for new pages are always welcome and will always help to improve the site. New pages usually have a small icon stating 'New' next to them on the menubar.