Digital Rust

I have always been fascinated by the weather and how it all works to affect day to day life.
Here in the U.K it is impossible to plan for hot sunny or cloudy stormy conditions as our climate will not let us forecast more than a week or so into the future with any accuracy.
As a tiny island in the North Atlantic we have several masses of air that are jostling for dominance overhead and as well as being highly unpredictable is also never static for more than a few days. Over the years I have tried to make some sense of it by following Met office predictions, looking at cloud types etc but have come to the conclusion that nobody seems to be able to predict things with any accuracy.

This led to my purchase of a weather station that is permanantly set up in my back yard. The unit has numerous sensors that will measure and record

* Wind Speed
* Wind Direction
* Outdoor Temperature (Min / Max)
* Wind Chill
* Outdoor Humidity
* Dew Point
* Atmospheric Pressure
* Rainfall
* Indoor Temperature (Min / Max)
* Indoor Humidity
* Time and Date

The mast with the sensors on conects via a wireless transmitter to an indoor base station/dataloger. This samples all the sensors every 10 minutes ( along with a datum time stamp ) and this data can be downloaded into software for further analysis.

I was extremely sceptical about this unit but as time goes by I have found it to be at least as accurate as my local news channel and I refer to it for making some kind of informed predictions about local weather conditions for as far as 2 days in advance.

Below left is the main datalogger screen and below right is the outdoor temperature for the week

If you click on the button above you can see the realtime weather conditions from the weather station located in my back yard

This data is refreshed about every 3 to 5 seconds

Pictures returned from Satellite images are undeniably beautiful. It is hard to conceive of such delicate and ethereal clouds that are the product of apparent chaos within a few miles of atmosphere

SAT24.com provides short animations from satelitte images and I urge you to stop by and take a look. Be patient, they take a few seconds to load

http://www.sat24.com/Region.aspx?country=gb&sat=vis&type=loop

I try and save satellite images at least twice per day and tie them to the dataset from the weatherstation. You can download my datasets here and I intend to upload them weekly. You can download the free weatherstation software here from Tycon that will allow you to import my weekly data to produce your own graphs. Alternatively you can import them directly into Excel to creat your own.

The location of my station is the Cannock Chase area of England located in the U.K

N 52.43 37.00 W 2.02 35.97 at an elevation of around 80 metres

I have no idea how or even if meteorologists 100 years ago tried to forecast the weather.