Deth

Fitness and everything else

Weather

I’ve always been obsessed with weather. Nature in general but when the ingredients come together to cause severe weather is just amazing to me. Nothing is cooler than watching the energy jump to the east cost then blossom into a large nor’easter! I can remember as a kid discovering AM weather on PBS and I’d wake up early every morning to watch it, even in the summer when there was no school. I had gotten a police scanner at one point and it received the National Weather Service’s NOAA weather Radio. I’d listen to that ALL the time. I’d fall asleep listening to it! Getting cable with the weather channel was awesome. Remember it was weather back than and not the lame ass shows like they have now.

Thunderstorms too are amazing to me. When there is enough heat and moisture in the atmosphere to form cumulus clouds then the latent heat causes them to continue to grow into towering cumulus then eventually cumulonimbus where the interaction between the updrafts and down drafts causes lightning

When I first got internet access at home in the mid 90s the first thing I looked up was weather related stuff. The web wasn’t like it is now back then so it was not possible to search like it is now. Newsgroups were much bigger back then and you could download the articles from the ones you were subscribed to then read them offline. There was no unlimited dial up back then. The news group that stands out that I remember reading the most is ne.weather. Back then there was so much useful information there and of course trolling. Then I started lurking on wright-weather forums. When they closed it was on to easteruswx then finally I now lurk on americanwx. Really I just have always lurked on these sites because I never felt I had anything to add but there were certainly some excellent posters.

I’ve had a couple of personal weather stations since I’ve had a computer. First I had an old cheap and shitty Oregon Scientific one that seemed to always be all over the place. I mean it was OK but it seemed to be all over the place at times and things broke pretty quickly.

After that I got a Davis Vantage Pro2 which was awesome to have. It lasted quite a few years until the console stopped connecting to the sensors consistently. It was really a neat toy to have even though I never had it installed properly. It was good enough for my needs.

I did not like the console though. It was poor contrast and slow but it worked. I guess it was pretty good for it’s time. Their intention wasn’t for it to be pretty. It was intended to just work no matter what.

What was nice was the sensors all seemed to work well accept the wind anemometer but that’s only because I never got around to mounting it properly. It wouldn’t have mattered that much because of the way the houses and other things around here would have blocked and altered the wind anyways.

For my early Christmas gift I received an Ambient weather WS-5000. I have been really pleased with it so far and it’s actually mounted unlike the old Davis was. Thus far it’s matching up with the local weather stations on Wunderground and such.