Weather Station

So, out of the blue, my father emails me asking if Calin might enjoy a weather station. I figured he had an unused one that he found while cleaning out the house. I am fairly certain I have seen an unused weather station in that house before.
I thanked him and said “Sure” and told him what a punk Jenny has been about not allowing me to have a 30′ pole in the yard. I thought I was just being funny. He gave a reply that seemed like something might have been lost in translation, so I let it go. The best way to deal with my dad is to disengage when he gets in a mood, so that is exactly what I did.

About a week later there was an email telling me to look at LaCrosse weather stations. I let it slide. The following day, he sent another one: “When you find one that Calin might like, send me the model number and I will order it for him.”

It took some digging, but I found an Acurite that was on sale at Amazon Warehouse for under $90. He countered with a $160 model. I wasn’t going to argue with that! About a week later, a large box arrived with Calin’s name on it.

This is us on Weather Underground
It has been great fun, especially for me. I’ve wanted one of these for a while now. Jenny printed out a ton of weather related worksheets for the kid to fill in. I’ve been showing him the cool graphs and how temperature and dew point are related to rainfall. My father sends cryptic messages from time to time asking us to figure out our elevation based on the air pressure. That is shockingly not easy to do, what with converting between not just F and C, but inches of Mercury (in Hg) to Pascals, too! This last weekend, I worked it out that we were lower than the local airport, which is entirely incorrect. But, still, it is fun. I would like to see if we can get one installed at Calin’s school.

I was able to get us on Weather Underground but installing the software WeeWX on a Raspberry Pi Zero W behind the receiver/display, which we have set up in the kitchen. WeeWX reads the data on the display and sends it out to WU, and a few other citizen scientist places, too. Doing our part.