Our personal Ten Mile Point Weather Station is located at the southeastern tip of Ten Mile Point near Cadboro Bay (Victoria, BC), at the eastern entrance of Baynes Channel and Haro Strait. It is sited to accurately measure the conditions on this busy waterway between Victoria and the US San Juan Islands. Winds (and currents) accelerate as the channel narrows between the Point and Chatham Island, often creating unique local conditions that can make a challenging passage for both sail and power boaters.
The water off the Point is a protected Marine Reserve, and is popular with scuba divers and kayakers. Sea life abounds; with many species of waterfowl, otters, seals, and orcas enjoying the rich upwelling waters off the Point.
The weather station is a professional Vantage Pro2 station designed by Davis Instruments that measures wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and rainfall. Data are transmitted via a wireless connection to an in-house server every 5 seconds, and uploaded to the website. The wind anemometer is located on the coastline 45 feet above sea level, and has highly accurate direct measurement of sea breezes from the north, east and south.
Currently, the real-time data are available to the public through two sources:
Our personal Ten Mile Point Weather website has been developed as a community resource in order to convey real-time weather data, plus forecasts, weather warnings, local radar, and other information from Environment Canada and other sources. Many residents in and around the Ten Mile Point area rely on this site for localized weather information.
The Weather Underground began in 1995 in San Francisco as as a world-wide community of weather enthusiasts, and has grown to over 100,000 members sending real-time data from around the globe. In return for contributing data to this world-wide data collection, Wunderground provides a vehicle to make one’s data available to the public. As might be expected, this ground-up “open source” entity has become quite valuable, and in 2012 was acquired by The Weather Company, owner of The Weather Channel.