Weather Station

The weather has always been of critical importance to me, for example, for birdwatching, fishing, camping or fell-walking; and it is not possible to go bird ringing in wet or windy weather. Wind strength and direction can influence a decision as to which beach to go fishing, whilst a good storm might blow in some unusual bird species. From an early age my sons recognised the importance of tv weather forecasts to me, during which even so much as a whisper from one of them could bring a threatening scowl to my face!

One of my duties when I was leader of Vanda Station, administered by the New Zealand Antarctic Research Programme, was to assist the meteorologist in observing, recording, coding up and transmitting meteorological data into the world data base. Since then I have recorded weather data during my own expeditions. Recently I have discovered the UK Weather World website which contains a detailed fund of weather information, with forums for registered members and opportunities to log personal daily weather observations - a very productive use of the internet.


To assist with this I have bought a desk-top weather station from the weather superstore Meteorologica. This system has a sensor unit which is fixed outdoors and which transmits a low-energy radio signal to the desk-top receiver indoors. The data recorded are temperature, relative humidity and barometric pressure (the desk-top unit additionally displays the indoor measurements of these factors).

Desk top weather station from Meteorologica. More details about the unit are found here here .
The indoor "desktop" unit. (The pointe shoes are an auto- graphed pair of Darcey Bussell's).



Outdoor sensor unit mounted underneath the gutter.

Recording temperature, humidity and barometric pressure is precise, and is simply copied down from the screen of the desk-top recorder. Cloud type and cover is more complex and is subjective, because a personal identification and judgment has to be made, and this comes with practice and experience.

Clouds can be diverse and fascinating to watch, and may appear to be complicated to record but are quite easily classified. Fundamentally there are only two "types" of cloud: the layer type (stratus) and the bubbly "cauliflower" type (cumulus). These may be attributed to one or more of three possible levels: low, medium and high. The medium level clouds are prefixed by alto, hence altostratus and altocumulus, whilst the high level clouds are prefixed by cirro, hence cirrostratus and cirrocumulus (low level clouds have no layer prefix but may be prefixed by nimbo, indicating rain).

Once this classification is learned, recording clouds becomes possible, though in practice the observations can be complicated by mixtures of several types. Hybrid terms are available to describe clouds that don't seem to be quite one thing or the other, for example stratocumulus. A very useful pictorial guide to cloud types is found here.