WeatherCat 3
Download
Overview
WeatherCat is weather station software for Macintosh computers. WeatherCat is designed to work with the following hardware-based weather stations:
- Davis Vantage range, Vue, Envoy, Monitor and Wizard stations. WeatherCat also supports the WeatherLinkIP data-logger and WeatherLink Live.
- La Crosse WS23xx range of stations.
- Oregon Scientific WMR 88.
- Oregon Scientific WMR 928/968.
- Oregon Scientific WMR 200.
- WeatherHawk stations equipped with an IP server module.
- Fine Offset WH1080/1081/1090/2080/2081/3080/3081 stations. These stations are often rebranded under a variety of names, for example Ambient Weather WS-1080 or Watson W-8681 – please see our wiki page for more information.
- Instromet MetPlus stations
- Columbia Weather Systems stations equipped with the weather micro server.
As weather data is gathered and stored in its database, WeatherCat allows you to view weather statistics such as the lowest temperature, or the highest wind speed over any time period stored in the database. In addition, WeatherCat can generate and upload simple web pages which offer a quick ‘canned’ solution to get your weather data on-line as quickly as possible, as well as template driven ‘custom’ web pages that can contain current conditions, graphs, gauges, statistics, webcam images and time-lapse movies; these web pages can be uploaded to your server by WeatherCat for display via a web browser anywhere in the world. A live list of all possible ‘tags’ that can be used in your templates is available here.
WeatherCat can also send your weather data to the Weather Underground (Wunderground), the Citizens Weather Observer Program (C.W.O.P.), the Met-Office WOW program, PWSWeather, WeatherBug, OpenWeatherMap and WeatherCloud. In addition it provides close to real time Custom C.G.I. upload to a web-server for your own web-based applications along with the ability to send your data to a MySQL database opening up a whole world of applications.
WeatherCat monitors the weather and can run a set of pre-defined and user programmed alerts that can trigger emails and/or run scripts should an alert trigger; for example to switch on your sprinklers, heating or cooling. In addition WeatherCat can integrate with other systems via its AppleScript interface. WeatherCat is designed to run 24/7/365 and doesn’t normally require user interaction or maintenance. Important events are notified via email – for example WeatherCat may detect a problem uploading weather data to Wunderground – it will typically be able to resolve the issue, but if it can’t, will send you an email. Other features include:
- Real time gauges, both basic and custom.
- Scrollable and synchronised graphs/daily data with direct access to any date in your database
- Comprehensive reports – recent, daily, monthly, annual. Daily and monthly reports are saved as PDF’s to disk, email option available
- Webcam integration via local connection, third party software or remote camera via http provides the following functionality.
- Daily and 1 hour time-lapse movie creation. Here’s the live daily movie being generated by the WeatherCat we have running here.
- Movie and image tags for use on web-sites.
- A banner generator for on-line forums/web pages (see our user banners at top of this page)
- Programmable current conditions rules to suit your particular climate
- Forecasts (if available from your weather station)
- Easy to use daily rain editor
- In-built weather journal (journal can be posted to web-pages)
- Unlimited custom graphs with various drawing/plot styles
- Clients for Mac OS X (available via ‘Other Downloads’ below) and iOS – both work over local network and internet.
- Great user generated/third party custom web-templates
- Integrated Meteotemplate driver.
- LWC2 compatibility (will import data and settings on first run)
- Export both raw and hourly data to .csv files. Daily auto-exports
- Additional custom web file processing for more dynamic web pages
- Data recording periods down to 1 minute with adaptive sampling
- MySQL database update rate down to 1 second with dual frequency recording option for wind versus other data (Intel based Macs only)
- Easy to understand central status view.
- Automatic daily backups of your weather data.
- Calibration including anemometer height compensation.
- Three channel satellite imagery recording and playback. Imagery is synchronised to weather data for viewing by date/scrolling through time.
- Daily snow editor and statistics.
- Synthetic channels allow the creation of new channel types from existing channels available from your station.
- Daily Types for the creation of custom day types (i.e. a wind day)
- NOAA style reports
- Custom Text Windows (CTW’s) allow the creation of new windows with user defined data. Example weekly and monthly windows are provided. An unlimited number of CTW’s can be defined.
- SDK for creating plug-ins.
WeatherCat’s feature list is extensive – we can’t cover them all here, but please feel free to download and browse the manual for more information (12 MB, PDF).
Complete change notes are available on the WeatherCat Wiki
Screenshots
Requirements
- Mac OS X 10.13 to macOS 14.x (Sonoma).
- Supported weather station hardware
- Optional web-cam
Download
Download WeatherCat (V3.3.0 27MB). WeatherCat 3 is a paid upgrade from WeatherCat 2. Upgrade licenses can be purchased here.
(Note that from version 3.1.3 onwards, and if running on macOS 12 or later, WeatherCat requires the Apple Python 3 runtime to be installed on your system for some of its functionality. You may be asked to install it via a dialog box (this will only happen once) – this video shows the process).
If you don’t have a WeatherCat 3 license, WeatherCat 3 comes with a 14 day trial period; during this time, all functionality will be available giving you time to see if it meets your needs. After the 14 day trial period, WeatherCat will stop collecting weather data and will require the purchase of a license to continue operation.
Other Downloads
WeatherCat Miscellaneous Files
Contains the WeatherCat OS X/macOS client (V2.0.1, 6th Feb 2021) along with other files referenced from the WeatherCat 3 user manual. WeatherCat Miscellaneous Files.
Software Development Kit
If you wish to write plug-ins for WeatherCat, you’ll need the WeatherCat SDK. Documentation and example project included (Xcode 4 or later)
Older Releases
Although no-longer maintained, supported or available to purchase, these older releases are made available should you need to reinstall an existing installation on an older machine.
WeatherCat (V2.4.4, 24 MB). Mac OS X 10.7.5 to macOS 10.13.
WeatherCat (V1.2.4, 18 MB) Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Intel) to 10.9
WeatherCat (V1.0.2, 16 MB) Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.8
WeatherCat (V1.0.2, 15.8 MB) Mac OS X 10.5 (PowerPC only)