Anemometer and Venus
Weather Station
My little weather station got an upgrade and I’m very pleased with the results.
I’ve run the station since I got it just after retiring as Norma gave me the go ahead to purchase the Davis instruments as an upgrade from my manual Maximum instruments package I’d had for decades – like since being a ski racer and patroller as a teen!
The Davis station is quite automated, and so I can connect to a number of citizen science projects like CoCoRaHS which measures precipitation daily via a manual check of my station in official NOAA rain and snow collectors, and I am a member of the Mesonet that Environment Canada set up first as a remote station monitoring project for place like rural Cape Breton, but which has since expanded to dozens of remote stations across the Province. I also contribute to CWOP (the Citizen’s Weather Observer Project), my daily reports to the Weather Network and to NOAA. Those projects all are much more exciting now as my little upgrade takes my station to a National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) level of recording and reporting – NIST develops and maintains the standards of measurement to which all others are ultimately traced.
In the end, weather observation is a fascinating hobby and a rewarding thing to be part of a science project that means something as my observations are used by meteorologists and scientists to do all manner of both forecasting and record keeping, as well as predicting and observing things like climate change.
It does mean looking after my station, including the required calibrations to make the unit NIST compatible, and doing the needed manual observations carefully and reporting them accurately, but it’s a lot of fun.
