We've been thinking it might be fun to have a weather station at our vacation home -- display (and record?) outside temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and precipitation. I haven't done any research yet but I'm guessing some here will have some experience that could help me avoid wasting time.

Anyone have one of these? What should I look for? Anything to avoid? Good places to look for one?

__________________
Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

I've an ex-boyfriend whose dad had one. It was way more entertaining than you might think--I spent an awful lot of time just sort of watching the weather information. (Clearly, I am not qualified to provide any sort of technical information at all.)

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Stop me if you've heard it...

Get a weather stone (e.g., Waiuku Weather Stone).

Ah, the old ones are good ones...

__________________
0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0....

Actually, around here predicting the weather is even easier. If you can't see Mt. Ranier, it's raining. If you can see it, it's going to rain.

Having said that, I must say we're having an exceptionally warm and dry summer. But I'd still like a weather station.

__________________
Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Here we have Weather Rocks (instead of stones). For instance, here's one at Donner Lake:

http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/...art=0&gallery=

and the text:

http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/...34#slideanchor

pretty similar except for the earthquake bit.

Yup, I've seen a number of weather rock jokes. It's almost as bad as the "Galupmaker" joke (if you don't know, you don't want to).

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Then there is the Wyoming Windsock. One of the things I get a chuckle from every now and then is the Weather Channel freaking out if there are gusts over 15 mph in Atlanta (where they're based), while wyoming frequently has sustained winds of 30 or better.

When I was in Basic Training, there was a guy from South Dakaota who had a picture of the "Welcome to South Dakota" sign. On the other side of the highway you could see the "Welcome to Wyoming" had blown over.

__________________
A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Where's Meteora when we need her?

I've been thinking about this for a while as well, and would love to be able to collect and store my own data.

Oh, and Tog_: the link you provided above yields a "This site does not support hotlinking" message.

Well, grr. I can click on it and see the picture. I thought hotlinking was if I posted the pic with IMG tags. There are some pictures on the parent site that have names that are a bit on the banned side for this board. Mostly of airplane crashes and birs strikes. Googleing 'micom oops' will bring it up. NOthing graphic, but a few that obviously didn't end well.

It's a (what looks to be) 3/4 inch chain sticking out nealry horizontal with a sign that reads:
Strength of wind from chain angle
0* Broken- call meterologist
30* Fresh Breeze
45* Gentle Zephyr
60* Hurricane in area
75* Beware of Low Flying Trains
90* Welcome to Big Wonderful Wyoming


As for the OP question, I looked at a few weather stations, but the problem I had was the requirement to run some of the instruments far enough away from the house, yet still have a cable running to them. I never found one that looked all that durable. Mostly toy sets.

__________________
A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Weird... I get the error message in Firefox but the picture displays in IE.

Great shot, by the way.

We have a weather string nailed to a board

So if it's moving- windy
If it's horizontal- Cyclone
If it's shrivelled- drought
if its vertical- tornado
If it's on fire- bushfire
If it's flooting- flood
If it's not there- some bugger's gone and knocked it off
etc..

__________________
If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

Sounds a lot like predicting weather in New England, which typically requires only three words, listed in sequence per awfullness: "bad", "worse", and "average". You don't want to be out in any of those.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

We have about 8 seasons here. In January it's Fog Season. Usually it lasts about a week, but one year it went for 46 days. High of 28, lo of 25 (F), visibility between 100 and 400 yards. That's fun

February is the second winter. It lasts until about mid-March when Spring shows up over night, bringing with it the winds. One year a freight train got blown over. Spring hangs around a while, then it snows again in April. Just once. Probably to try and kill of the people that took off their snow tires after the week in the mid 70's.

Spring comes back and lasts about a weekend. Then it's allergy season. until June. Our first Summer runs from June to mid July and is hot and dry. Mid July through the first week of August is hot and wet, then it goes back to hot and dry for a few weeks. Early September is Autumn for week or two, then we have "Indian Summer". It's like curtain call for heat.

By the end of September we are fully into Autumn. New moon weekend in October it will either snow or rain. Then Autumn comes back until sometime in between mid Novemeber and mid December, when Winter kicks in.

We have TV weather guy that absolutely loves the weather here and he's very good at reading it. Not the script, the skies. He passes off a good deal of Native American weather lore too, then talks about how accurate it is. One year it either snowed or rained on every full moon for 7 months (or something like that). He said something to the effect of, "I don't know what that means, but it's a pretty neat thing to keep track of"

As it turns out, the ring around the Sun or Moon means bad weather within three days. That one seldom misses. The more concentrated a contrail from a jet is, the more likely it is that wet weather is coming. Warm south winds, especially in winter means you start storing food, you're gonna be inside a lot the next few days. And if he ever wears a white coat for the forecast, big snow is comming.

__________________
A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

LOL!

Sounds a lot like the weather in Palmyra, New York. No wonder Brigham Young said, "This is the place!"

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

To be fair, I do think that was said before anyone noticed that the only thing that could survive in the lake wre sea monkeys, though when the wind is just right, you can smell them.

I think the odd weather we get has to do with the big lake to the west and big, 'reversed C' shaped mountain ranges to the east. Nothing stops the new stuff from coming in fast, then it hits the hills and stops dead.

So do you ever get "The Dreaded Lake Effect" snows up that way? Where the sky sucks up half the water in the lake then dumps it in the form of 4 feet of snow on a 1 mile wide part of town?

__________________
A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

I was part of a team that was moving a company we had acquired from Sodus, NY to CT. This happened during the winter and early spring of course. Sodus is on the southeast shore of Lake Ontario, not too far from the famous burg of Oswego .

I can remember driving back to CT and getting on the NY Turnpike in the middle of a blizzard. Just after I left Newark heading for Syracuse I heard on the CB that the turnpike had been closed. That was a long drive.

__________________
A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

My brother has a weather station he's pretty happy with (you can see his data online here). I'll have to ask him what his model is.

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Stick hand out window, work for me.

__________________
So descredo no incrivel

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

-- Moody Blues

Not only his data, but links to suppliers of weather stations. Just what I was looking for, thanks! (His model is listed on his page, by the way, although I don't see it in the list of suppliers.)

__________________
Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.