So, when I turn the pages of my local hobbyist catalog, I am transported to that earlier time, when with a few boards and nails in hand, I constructed a weather station and filled it with equipment that I largely made myself. It was crude, not fancy, but in most cases it worked with a fair degree of accuracy - and I learned so much from my experience that I decided to write this article to share some of my insights with you.
Let me simplify this a bit for you. You only have 2 choices: you can go outside to take your weather instrument readings or you can stay inside and take your readings off of a display panel. All weather forecasting equipment will let you do one or the other. You must make your choice.
If you want to go outside to take your readings (the old-fashioned method), then you will need to make sure that your instruments can be completely stored outdoors (not all models can). You will also need to locate your equipment in some sort of a shelter - typically made of wood or metal, with louvered vents. And of course, you will be forced to go outside - even when it's cold and rainy - to take each day's reading.
On the other hand you can purchase equipment for your home weather station that has an indoor and an outdoor component. The indoor component contains the dials and screens and other components that give you the reading - the rest stays outside, connected by a cable (or via a wireless transmission) to your inside display instrumentation.
If you are a home weather station newbie, you should begin your forecasting journey by investing in basic equipment: rainfall indicator, barometric pressure gauge, wind direction and speed indicator, and humidity gauge. Some of these are sold as an integrated weather workstation unit, with an indoor 'dashboard' that will give you your equipment readouts. The equipment does all the work, you stay indoors nice and toasty. Nice!
If you get ambitious (and as your skill and knowledge grows), you can invest in such things as a thermo-hygrometer (it measures humidity and temperature, giving you a 'heat index'), or a baro-hygrometer (which measures humidity and barometric pressure). In general, the wireless home weather stations are easier to get up and running, but they can cost considerably more than their wired counterparts. Some home weather-persons believe that the hard-wired equipment gives better readings than the wireless type, but you will have to judge that for yourself.
One final note - this equipment is generally not cheap to buy, so if you are buying it for your kids make sure that they are really interested in the subject and are willing to keep at it. If you think that ther is the chance that they might lose interest, it would be better for them to make their own crude (but fully functional) equipment at first. By the way, having a home weather station is a great family activity - maintaining the equipment as well as taking the daily readings. I wish you happy forecasting!
