Weather Monitoring I have always liked to measure physical quantities from the environment (weather, etc.). That must come from my fatalistic side: if you can't change it, find consolation in measuring its behaviour: maybe an explanation will emerge... Turns out this is how science works. You observe a phenomenon, repeatedly, with different equipment, different resolutions, and at the end you can start thinking about a model which will serve at predicting the behaviour of things. Now generations of meteorologists have been working on this problem, with some success, and let me say it immediately, I won't solve their problem here! I just find it fun to be able to gather under one set of purposes my love for weather watching and my computer skills. There is also a real application that can make use of all this: an automatic astronomical observatory . This sort of application is described elsewhere and I will concentrate here on some aspect of modern weather watching. In the beginning... Over 20 years ago now, when I was 15 year old, I built my first electronic weather station: A digital LED thermometer, bought as a kit, assembled in an alumium case. This basic setup was soon enhanced with, within the same enclosure -see picture below, a wind rose with colored LED to show the wind direction. The real detector here was a wind compass attached to the roof. It was a metal an wood assembly (I should say contraption!) where a magnet would switch REED relays on and off as the wind was pushing the vane in one direction or another. The relays would then activate one or the other LED to indicate the wind direction. Wind speed was also there, but no fancy counting here: just an LED, blinking faster with faster wind. The detector was a simple wooden two-blade fan making an electrical contact at each revolution. The picture next to this is for sentimentality only. | |
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