The ideal home weather station should be somewhere between the two forbidding extremes of low-end stations that are little more than throwaway tots and the top-end station favoured by the semiprofessionals (and several retired meteorological experts). The challenge is to find a station that gives you something quickly and still has something in reserve for you to come to grips with. I know all too well the feeling that comes with paying good money for a weather station and finding out within three months that I had exhausted its capabilities.
Now while none of us has a crystal ball it is reasonable to draw up a list of must-haves for what I would consider a good quality home weather station.
At a minimum it must have remote sensors – without these you are still really in joke territory – there’s only so much weather you can predict keying off the variations in your central heating. Nowadays that means wireless remote sensors, all feeding back to the main base station positioned somewhere both discreet and accessible. In my house i have the station positioned by the door – I like it to be the last thing i see before I leave, but you can put it anywhere than makes sense to you. Many people place theirs in the kitchen, where it becomes a conversation piece.
So – sensors. While we cover these in much greater detail elsewhere in the site, let me just outline what I regard as the minimum set:
- rain gauge – pretty fundamental in the UK. Up here in Scotland, it seems most conversation about the weather begin with a mention of whether it has been raining or not.
- anemometer – I know these can look a bit silly in a small-scale (which is what this mid-range is limited to), but they do an adequate job. Let’s face it, changes in wind direction are almost impossible to track manually, so this is one device that may surprise you with its results and underlying patterns. We’re talking here about both wind-speed and direction in a single sensor.
- remote thermometer! a little like the cuddly toy in The Generation Game, this is the first thing most people think about. In terms of surprises, temperature is one of the few things I can just about guess by walking around my garden. But need it you do.
- atmospheric pressure – the granddaddy of weather forecasting sensors and the one which you could use on its own for weather forecasting, certainly of the finger-in-the-air variety. As a fan of the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey-Maturin novels, I love the way that |Aubrey spends more money on accurate barometers than he does on any other object he owns and can carry.
