Follow this guide on the basics of weather stations and maybe discover your new favorite hobby.
A weather station is a land or sea facility equipped with instruments for measuring atmospheric conditions. The collected data provides indispensable information for weather forecasts and to conduct studies on the climate.
The most common measurements include temperature, humidity, air pressure, rainfall, wind direction and wind speed. To measure temperature and humidity the station’s sensors must be kept from direct sunlight in order to prevent inaccurate collections. Meanwhile, wind measurements require as few obstacles as possible.
Sea stations are found in ships and buoys and measure sea surface temperature, as well as wave-related data.
Weather station instruments
The essential weather data measuring instruments are:
The thermometer to measure the temperature of the air and the sea surface.
- The hygrometer for measuring humidity.
- The anemometer that measures wind speed.
- The barometer to measure atmospheric pressure.
- The rain gauge to collect and measure rainfall.
- The pyranometer for measuring solar radiation.
Other more sophisticated and technologically advanced weather stations are equipped with many more instruments for high-precision data collection. Among them are those used to measure ultraviolet index, soil moisture and temperature or visibility.
The instruments should be kept in a well-ventilated plastic container housing and should be able to support both manual and automatic collections and transmissions.
Personal weather stations
At Weather Station Finder we teach you how to build your own personal weather station, known by the connoisseurs of the lingo as PWS. You can do it solely for recreational purposes or as a way to contribute to localized forecasts by sharing the data you collect. Besides the PWS, you can also buy home weather stations that don’t require you mounting all the components yourself. You can share the info collected by those as well.
Personal weather stations are now more advanced than ever and allow for extremely accurately forecasts. Depending on where you stand between viewing it as a hobby or as something more serious, the market has stations available that range from just two sensors to more than ten.
These stations can be linked to your home’s internet devices for you to monitor and read results. You can then upload them to open-source stations designed for individuals to contribute with their collections and improve the accuracy of the forecasts in a hyper-localized manner. You may share your data with Weather Underground or the Citizen Weather Observer Program.
Some of the most important weather station networks in the US are in the states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia and Indiana.
