Weather Station - Data Coming to This Blog Soon!

Jeff just got and installed a wireless weather station on the roof. He is pretty excited, and when we start getting some rain it will be very interesting! Last year we had a day with 13 inches or so, and probably some days with more than that. Now we can tell for sure how much has fallen. It measures wind speed/direction, humidity, temperature in and out, barometric pressure and when we install the software we can keep track of these things I suppose (Jeff knows all the ins and outs of the thing).


My next big task is to pressure wash and reseal the roof. We went up and removed a large antennae we don't need, removed anchor wires etc in preparation for my big week (next week maybe). Once things were tidied up we could see where to put the weather instruments. This box has the pressure/temp/humidity doodads in it and we mounted it in a shaded spot on the direct tv dish mount. Even so, the roof still measures about 10 degrees hotter than inside.

This is the rain collector. When this mini scoop fills up it dumps and measures, refills, dumps measures. What I'm not sure about is what happens if there isn't enough to dump? It is very small - does it evaporate and not get added to the next time it rains? It seems mechanical, so I don't think it dumps automatically to start the day. I don't know. This is just sitting up there for now and we will mount it after I take care of the roof.

Here's the little wind turbine. We stuck it on part of the old antenna mount and put a pop bottle of cement around it for stabilization (no anchor ties required). The rope holds it for now until the cement dries. Then we have to get our compass up there and make sure it is pointing in a true direction. So fairly soon we will have some interesting data about our little jungle here. We did have a little over an inch of rain on Sunday which was the first rain in weeks. And besides that, we will have a newly sealed bright white roof before the next hurricane season! Haven't had any leaks, but it has been a little over two years that we know of since the last sealing. Better safe than sorry even though it looks pretty good.