Monday, June 15, 2020
I have joined the weather underground. Not the militant radical one found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground but this one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(weather_service) an internet-based weather service utilizing weather information from volunteer weather station operators. Although both originated at the University of Michigan, that is where the similarity starts and ends.
Since I was a kid, I have always wanted to have a home weather station of good quality that did not cost a fortune. The professional/serious hobbyist models start at $1000. The one I now have is nowhere near that expensive, but if I added up the money for all of the cheaper ones I have bought over the years, it would no doubt equal one expensive one. Or more.
I have been interested in weather since I was a kid. And in response to that interest, Santa brought me my first weather station when I was young enough I still hoped Santa was real. I can blame “Santa” for my obsession.
It was one of the better things “he” ever brought me. It wasn’t just a weather station, it was a science kit/leaning tool. I had to assemble each sensor and wire them into the console. Even getting that far it wasn’t easy to view anything it was telling me. I had to count flashes of red light to calculate the wind speed, and use a wet bulb/dry bulb calculation to find the humidity. It was inaccurate as far as any real current conditions went. But I had fun building it and learned a lot. This wasn’t the sort of “toy” Santa ever brought to my brother or sister. Maybe he had seen I had some sort of talent I had not realized at the time.
As I continue to explore old hobbies that were of interest to me long ago, again I found that the level of technical changes and a relative decrease in cost for weather stations over the years is phenomenal. The current iteration of weather stations I decided on is exponentially beyond that initial gift from Santa or any of the other brands I have had limited success in setting up over the years. It is an Ambient Weather WS-2902B Osprey. The main sensor array is solar powered by day and uses a slow discharge capacitor for nighttime. For days with too much cloud cover, it has a battery backup.
It has about every weather sensor you could want. Assembly was minimal. It has an indoor display console, and you can connect it to the internet. Of course, that was the main goal of mine. I have it open on my computer as I write. Being a total weather geek, I was excited to see my station listed for the first time on the map of other stations in town. Through the connection of my personal weather station to http://www.wunderground.com, I have joined more than 250,000 other weather hobbyists supplying local weather conditions across the country. I have a phone app to access my backyard weather on my phone wherever I go. And the weather underground people use my data and that of the others to help in producing more accurate forecasts.
This was a bit of trouble (it is me, and this is how things go). I started with the station mounted on a stand on my deck. That seemed to get too much reflected heat from the house there, so I moved it 100 feet out into the yard where it is surrounded by tall grass and short shrubs. It should be a perfect spot. But it is still a bit on the hot side. Now I see for a hundred dollars more, I could have had one that has a fan to draw air into the temperature and humidity chamber for use in hotter less windy climates. Now they tell me.
Maybe next time. Or maybe next time I will spring for the $1,000 level.
Update- Prior to this being published, I had noticed a “Gold Star” emblem had been added to my station readout. Wondering about this as I tend to do about everything, I found that this is a notice by Wunderground that my station has passed their quality control to become one of 20,000 stations used to generate Forecasts on Demand.
From their information-
1. There are 200,000+ observations per minute ingested
2. QC every 10 minutes to remove bad data
3. Current conditions available on mobile, web & API
4. 20,000 Gold Star stations’ data used to generate Forecast on Demand-
Memory is the Key 