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Points / Overview

Introduction

In NovaStar, points correspond real or derived/synthetic sources of data for the NovaStar database. Points, point types and point classes characterize data associated with specific kinds of sensors and specify the data management approach that will apply to the points. A point may be an actual sensor making physical measurement, or an output signal that controls equipment and indicators. In addition, a point can be the output from a calculation or another derived value. Each station defined in NovaStar may have multiple associated points, such as a battery voltage sensor, a precipitation gage and a pressure transducer measuring water level. Each of these points provides raw data that must be calibrated and verified differently.

Data provided by the remote sensing stations is raw data, which may requires some mathematical conversion so that meaningful numbers in the desired engineering units are available from the database. The engineering values are scaled data and are displayed in reports and used for data analysis. Some stations may transmit engineering values. NovaStar uses "calibrations" to convert raw data to scaled values. For example, precipitation tips may be converted to inches of rain, or water level pressure transducer value converted to elevation. Calibration data consist of adder and multiplier. If the raw values are already in engineering units, the calibration data will have multiplier of 1.0 and adder of 0.0.

In addition, NovaStar can provide automatic data checking and verification procedures to improve the quality of data available for analyses and response by identifying data reports that are clearly invalid. For example, values that are clearly out of normal range are marked as questionable. Erroneous data points may be reported to NovaStar due to corrupt radio transmissions, sensor failure or other causes.

For most raw data reports, a single corresponding point data value is defined, because transmissions from most remote sensors include only one data value. Exceptions include:

  • digital status sensors, which may report multiple digital inputs per data value
  • ALERT wind (wind run and wind direction) sensors. NovaStar separates the raw data report digital input values into separate point data values. For ALERT wind raw data reports it extracts the wind run and direction, computes wind speed and stores wind speed and direction in separate points.

The Point menu provides sub-menus for data related to points, including: