WeatherIQ: All about weather stations!

[Music] hey everybody it's first warden storm team chief meteorologist brad pinovich i'm outside today because we're talking about a topic that i love because i love weather stations i have several maps probably way too many but i want to explain some of the things that go into weather stations what makes weather stations great what makes them accurate if you're looking for at home weather station i'll give you some tips and some things you can look for but i want to start today with talking about weather stations so i'm outside and i'm going to take you a little tour of my backyard i actually got a part of a weather station back behind me and i'll explain and one up on the roof that i'm going to show you in a minute and i'm going to bring up our first weather station here because this is a one of the first weather stations that we had at the station we actually mounted this on our storm tracker um the thing i love about this is that it's all inclusive so inside this weather station we have an anemometer we have a wind vane or weather vane and then embedded in here underneath these upside down looking plate things these are actually the thermometer hygrometer and barometer and i'll explain what those are in a minute but first one of the most important tools in a weather station is the anemometer phenomena it's a mouthful the best way i can describe this to you is this is a speedometer for the wind this is a type of anemometer called a cup anemometer other type of anemometers i'm going to show you a really cool one that i have experimental one two at my house that are ultrasonic they're really cool i'll explain more about that a basic anemometer is a is a wind sock it's just a sock that blows in the wind and um it basically the the more it blows out the higher the wind is the wind sock you'll see there's airports or helipads below this is a wind vein or weather vein okay now a wind vane or weather vane it's technically a wind vane because it tells us which direction the wind is going now it looks like an arrow so everybody thinks the wind is going that way but here's the thing it points into the wind so the wind is actually coming from this direction what happens is this airplane tail looking wing thing if the wind is coming from this side of the screen it blows that wing around it blows over here it swings around the wind hits it there and it basically bounces back and forth until it points directly in the wind so the wind is actually going this direction so it looks weird the arrow's going the other way but it points into the wind if you know if high or low pressure is moving in you can predict the weather pretty accurately within 24 hours using a barometer but because high pressure spins clockwise and low pressure spins counterclockwise you can also tell if the higher low pressure moving in based on the wind direction so farmers learned this right away that if we had a south wind we had low pressure heading our way if we had a northwest wind high pressure was moving in so you can kind of tell the type of systems moving in whether good bad or you know in different weather um and so farmers would call them weather veins and a lot of people call them weather beans because they help you predict the weather that's why most of these are on barns you might see them as a rooster up on the roof then inside this part is the uh thermometer which everyone knows measures the air temperature and the hygrometer hydrometer is a fancy word to measure the amount of moisture in the air there's humidity outside dew points molecules of moisture in the air right now so spread out that you can't see them until you squish them together so the hygrometer measures the amount of moisture or water vapor in the atmosphere um there's also a barometer in here which tells us the atmospheric pressure now this is the key part and part of the reason i'm outside is there's these upside down looking plates why are those there this is the most important part of a weather station and where a lot of people get bad temperature measurements um the temperature and actually the dew point should be taken in complete darkness not the shade complete darkness these are called radiation shields radiation shields sound really scary right away people think oh my gosh radiation what type of radiation well i'm not talking about nuclear power plant radiation we're talking about radiation from the sun ultraviolet radiation the biggest source of radiation in our planet we do not want to contaminate the temperature with sunlight we're not measuring the temperature of the sun we're measuring the temperature of the air so we only want the air to be sensed or measured so if sunlight is getting in there hitting the sensor we're actually measuring the the incoming solar radiation heating up the sensor and not heating the air and if it's open to the ground and there's a light bouncing off the ground we're measuring that as well so um even in the shade even though you're not in direct sunlight you're getting indirect sunlight you would not get a correct measurement so a lot of people buy weather stations or thermometers and put them up at their house and wonder why they read so sometimes too warm or too cold it's because they're not shielded correctly because at night the opposite happens when there's no sun the more view of the sky you have things cool off quicker than they should you're actually called radiational cooling this is how we get frost on mornings where the temperature is not below freezing because the surface can cool to the freezing point even though the air can stay above the freezing point and i'm going to put this down i'm going to walk over here to my to my weather station because i want to show you a big version of this this is actually my weather station home over here and i have it mounted back here it's wireless but you can see uh well there's a bug on there you can see an example of a pretty significant um radiation shield so there's a thermometer in there there's also a lightning detector and there's also a hygrometer so these upside down plates are several of them keeps this from being affected by sunlight now um you've probably never seen a rain gauge like this it doesn't look like much the rain goes in there i have a broken one this is all this is this rain gauge has a funnel that sits on the top so it rains it fills up that bucket the other type of rain gauge a little less accurate this giant thing so it's got a float which will float up in there and tell us the measurements the most accurate measurement of rain is actually using this manual rain gauge to the nearest one 100th of an inch notice those little marks that's the lowest measurement of rain so how this works is this sits inside this giant tube and you can see it goes up to one inch and you're like that's not a lot of rain what if we get more than that this is where this part comes in this sits inside here we will actually get rain to fill up that middle tube if it fills up an inch it'll overflow into the external part which holds an additional five inches so this whole gauge can hold up to six inches of range so you have to go out and check this every day when we go outside what i do is if it's overflowing it'll overflow inside here i take this and i say one inch of rain i dump it out whatever water is left in here i'll dump it in here and if it fills up again it'll it'll be filled up and i will dump it out again and then i'll take that moisture and put it back in here it'll fill up again that's three inches of rain so we can add up to six inches of rain within the rain gauge um we have out here and actually i have one over here i have two of these cocoros rain gauge these things are about 20 to 30 depending where you are if you want to become a spotter this is the best thing you can do in your yard because rain is the most variable form of weather we have temperature does change a little bit from neighborhood to neighborhood it changes over bigger areas but rainfall is dramatic it literally can rain in your neighborhood and not the next so rain gauges are really important and if you want to measure rain you need this one this is the standard official rain gauge we love these rain gauges everybody should have one of these in my opinion to measure rainfall now i talked about a really cool weather station that i'm actually have at the house that i'm working on right now i'm testing um it is really cool this is it okay the cool thing about this ring or this a weather station every part of the weather station is in this one piece i don't have separate pieces they're all right here and you can see this side actually has solar panels so this is powered by the sun it's wireless you can actually see it's got radiation shields here so you know it's got the thermometer hydrometer here but here's the cool thing you're probably asking brad where's the anemometer where's the rain gauge where's the wind vane all that stuff this is it right here this thing is two plates you see the four holes there these two plates have sound waves that bounce back and forth so as the wind goes through these plates it disrupts the sound waves and it measures the wind speed it's the most sensitive accurate measurement of wind speed because there's no moving parts so it can measure just the subtle little bit of wind it's called an ultrasonic anemometer so it basically measures the wind going through these plates and because it knows what direction it's coming from this is due north that line right there we know what direction it's coming so the cool thing about not having so why is it important not to have moving parts well first of all a little bit about physics with anything that moves if we're measuring the wind speed it's going to take some initial energy to get this moving so the first one maybe one and a half mile per hours of wind actually is used up making it move so it takes enough wind to get this to move so low end wind speeds you have a tough time measuring because it takes enough wind to get this going so if this takes one mile per hour to move that means anything less than a mile per hour we would never measure um the other thing is anything that moves breaks eventually it just wears down um the other thing during ice storms ices up so anything that moves breaks the nice thing about having no moving parts with an ultrasonic anemometer nothing breaks nothing freezes up and you get lower measurements now the other cool thing about this where's the rain gauge you're asking this is probably the coolest piece of technology on this this plate on the top is a pressure plate it's called the haptic rain gauge and what that means is it actually senses raindrops hitting the top and whether they're big or small this runs an algorithm basically a a calculus equation and it figures out how much rain is falling and how fast based on the number of droplets and the nice thing about it it's self learning it's got ai so it'll learn over time based on real time weather stations in the area that if it's over underestimating and i've been honest because i've had this one in my yard and this one on my roof for about a year now this is within about 10 accuracy of this which is saying something because i don't have to check it i don't have to clean it i don't have to go measure anything it does it all on its own also a cool feature that's actually a uv sensor so it lets me know how much uv light is coming in and then inside there obviously we have um the the thermometer hygrometer barometer and a lightning detector so this measures a lot of parameters all in this small little package which you can mount on a one-inch pole and stick up on your roux i love this weather station and i've been testing it for a while and i have one of the previous models and i think to me this is going to be the one i would recommend for everybody it's not cheap it's going to be about 300 bucks and that leads me to my next thing if you want to get a weather station for your house um they range from as little as 30 to 50 to as much as a thousand dollars um and so what you paying for with an expensive weather station is one it does a lot of cool things and it measures a lot of cool things but here's the most important thing pretty much every weather station is going to work fine initially the cheap ones just don't last what you're paying for in price is duration how long they last remember this is going to be in the weather every minute every hour every day 24 hours a day seven days a week 52 weeks a year for years and years and years just like this one you know this is what it looked like a couple years in the sun um these things will wear down that's why no moving parts and one piece and the price you're paying for is this thing to last forever also i like about this solar power don't throw out changing batteries the other thing is i don't need a computer on this will measure continuously i have a hub inside my house and everything is sent to a smartphone app so you can bring this up um on your phone and so the one on my roof right now that's the temperature up there and you can see i actually have a lot of parameters wind speed voltage uv index right now is very low because it's cloudy um but it's a very cool weather station and when i'm done testing it i'm going to do a big review um and you know let people know how what i think and why i would buy this so you know why is it important to have weather stations well obviously we have weather stations at all the airports and all over the world and country but the more we add the more data that goes into our numerical modeling the only way we can forecast the weather is by knowing what's happening now all across the world at the same time and then we can forecast or simulate what the atmosphere is going to do into the future so weather stations are cool before i go i want to show you the ones i have up on my roof i'm actually going to see if i can show this so that's the one up on my roof right in the middle of your screen i actually have two of them mounted up there right now with two cameras to kind of show you and just to show you that i am full into this um i've got two weather stations at my house uh one unit completely up there and obviously the temperature gauge in the backyard feel free to ask me a question shoot me an email if you're looking at a certain uh station for your backyard i get that question a question often and i will tell you um just get one first start small maybe as you get you get into weather stations and backyard weather or spotting and observing for us you can work your way up to something like this because this this is the weather flow smart weather station i think this is the wave of the future anyone can install this you only need a smartphone app you don't need a computer you just need wi-fi and that's it and you're good to go and this data can be made public or not public depending on what you want to do with it you can look at your phone your neighbors can look at it you can make it anonymous really cool and this data if you feed it publicly we'll go into the weather models and hopefully improve the forecast for your backyard [Music]

Channel: WCNC Charlotte Weather IQ

Views: 10,554

Keywords: charlotte, north carolina, weather, nc weather, sc weather, south carolina, forecast, science, atmospheric science, brad panovich, wxbrad, wcnc charlotte, charlotte north carolina, ncwx, scwx, cltwx, wx

Id: rMXrbJdrWQU

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 22 2021