How Do Weather Stations Work?
When you look at a weather station, you'll notice it needs to have at least a few different pieces of equipment to measure the varying changes in the atmosphere. These changes are used, in conjunction with past data, to try to predict the upcoming weather. They're highly scientific, whether being used by professional meteorologists or someone at home.
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Features
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There are a series of tools included on most weather stations. Most of them include a thermometer to pick up the current temperature, a barometer to gauge air pressure, a hygrometer for humidity, and a rainfall gauge to determine how much rain has fallen during a given period. This is usually the minimum, although most also include an anemometer, a device which measures wind speed. Because of all of this equipment, they're best placed fairly high up and away from buildings. Some more complicated devices also have things like optical sensors for measuring cloud cover and sensors to measure things like soil moisture levels.
Considerations
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If you're looking into purchasing a home weather station, there are a few things you will need to consider. Ease of set-up and wireless transmission range are going to be important factors--if you can't set it up, and you can't get the information from your home, it will be harder to use. The graphical display and computer interface are also important, because you'll need to actually process the information somehow.
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Function
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By measuring the variables taken by the weather station, you can get a picture of what's going on in the world around you, weather-wise. A snapshot of these data points doesn't give you a lot, but if you track those variables over time, you'll have something a little more useful. Weather prediction is a game of numbers: Looking at the patterns that are going on currently, as compared to patterns in past weather situations gives weather men a vague idea of what should happen in future. At home, you have resources like the Internet; major weather associations use supercomputers that crunch those numbers.
Size
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A home weather station only actually is a network of one, but a major association, such as NOAA, will have thousands of stations spread out across the country. This massive network gives even more information to build a statistical model for predicting the weather. So, starting a weather station at home means you likely will not be able to predict a whole lot.
Misconceptions
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Accurate predictions of the weather are actually virtually impossible. A prediction made using data from weather stations is predominantly a guess. It's a guess based on previous patterns in the weather, meaning that a weather man's predictions on TV are based more on the odds that it will rain or not rain, based on other times it's rained or not rained.
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References
- Photo Credit instruments on the weather station. image by Tom Oliveira from Fotolia.com
