Growing up in a farming family, weather conditions were central to our prosperity. No one obsessed over the weather quite like my father, and who could blame him? We raised wheat without irrigation, so a few rainstorms (or lack-thereof) could make or break our year. He always seemed to be on the lookout for a better thermometer or a better rain gauge (and would make a 20-mile round trip to check all of the gauges he had distributed across his fields). He watched The Weather Channel like it was prestige TV. The man loved tracking the weather. Now I follow in his footsteps!

While my own livelihood does not depend so much on the weather, I do have a long-standing interest in weather conditions, patterns, and forecasting. I’m probably even more interested in storing and plotting large datasets. Acquiring a good weather station unlocks the ability to do all of the things!

For my first weather station, I bought the Ambient Weather WS-2902. Ambient Weather’s stations seem to be well-regarded for their accuracy (so far the results line up pretty closely with a station at a nearby airfield) so I pulled the trigger.

The station itself is pretty solid. It was easy to assemble, and I just bolted it to an existing fencepost in our backyard. We have a large yard that backs into a corn field (hi Nebraska) so there are no structures close enough to interfere with measurements. It connects wirelessly to a control panel inside the house, but the fun only begins there.

The control panel sits on our local network and can send readings to PWS Weather and Weather Underground. It also has the ability to send data to a custom location, which is where the real fun begins. To start, I set up an instance of WeeWX, an open source weather station dashboard, on a local Ubuntu Server VM. This gives me a realtime dashboard of local conditions and exportable archives.

I think the Wind Vector graph is my favorite.

I’m also piping all of the data out to an InfluxDB to feed some more custom Grafana dashboards. This one tracks my observed record highs and lows for various readings:

I have also been a dedicated user of Carrot Weather and was delighted to discover that I can choose a nearby weather station to provide current conditions in the app:

Anyway, this has been a very fun project so far. I can’t wait to see what kind of records pop up in my dashboard through the years!