Warming temps, sun, a lot of melting and using your own weather station when you're blind

Good Morning Augusta

This morning we have partly cloudy skies giving way to cloudy skies for this afternoon.  High will reach 41°F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph.

Tonight we’ll have a lot of clouds with a 50% chance for rain showers. Low 36°F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.

The readings from my weather instruments are:

Humidity is 59%, the Dew Point is 11.5°F and the outdoor temp is 23.7°F.

The wind direction is   West between 1.1 MPH and 1.5 MPH, generating a wind chill of 23.5°F.

The Relative pressure is 30.34, the Absolute pressure is 30.04 and falling with a weather graphic indicating snow/rain.

The UV rating is 1 out of 16, Sunrise is 7:02 a.m. Sunset is 4:41 p.m., Moonrise is 12:53

p.m., Moonset is 2:52 a.m. and the moon phase is Waxing Gibbous being 78% illuminated.

The RAW METAR readings from Augusta’s airport are:

METAR KAUG 271153Z AUTO 20004KT 10SM CLR M06/M11 A3041 RMK AO2 SLP306 T10561106 11056 21106 56022

Visibility is 10.0 miles / 16.0 kilometers with clear skies.

We didn’t receive any rain or snow here over the past 24 hours.

Space Weather for this morning is:

Today’s Solar flux is 67, the solar wind speed is 440  Kilometers per second and the chance of a solar storm is 1%.

The weather here in Augusta, Maine is much like the weather elsewhere in New England.  That is to say, it changes quickly, and the weather readings one gets from the local airport are the generalizations for the area.  I became interested in monitoring weather when I was giving serious consideration to putting up a few wind turbines (monitor wind speeds) on our farm, which I haven’t gotten around to putting up. 

While there are many different models of outdoor weather stations you can buy that broadcast weather readings to your PC, I face one problem most weather enthusiasts don’t.  I’m blind.

Blindness hadn’t stopped me from practicing law, and I had no intention of letting it stop me from putting up my own wireless weather station, configuring it’s display unit to send the data to my PC and process it there so I could post it on my own weather blog.

Right now I’m on my second weather station, an Ambient WS-1001-WIFI Observer.  Having been up for just about a year, it’s been working well.  The first one I put up lasted about a year before some instrument failure issues arose, so trust me when I say that all wireless weather stations are not created equal.

For those unfamiliar with how wireless weather stations work, you put up an outdoor unit, usually one with an anemometer, wind direction indicator, thermometer, dew point/humidity gauge and hygrometer and rain gauge.  All of which broadcasts to an indoor display unit, which in turn can broadcast to your PC(not all models do this, but some can).

If the model you select does, you’ll need a software package compatible with your model weather station, usually produced by a third party.  This way you can keep records and compile the statistics on your PC that you’re interested in.

For me, having the data appear on my PC is the only way I can “read” it.  AS I said, I’m blind, so my PC “Talks” via an adaptive software program, a speech synthesis program called “JAWS.”

Once I have access to the data my weather station reads and broadcasts, I put it on my blog together with material from other sources that I feel people might be interested in, such as the daily “space weather” readings.  OF course everyone checks on the daily solar wind speed, solar flux and probability for a solar storm,  right?

The upshot is this – even if you’re blind, monitoring local weather, practicing law and writing murder mystery novels are not only possible, but are fun.