Hello all!
I'm posting today to ask your opinion (from a quick browse of the forums - far beyond my experience) on what I should buy my father to put inside his backyard weather station.
I should mention that my dad has been an amateur meteorologist as long as I can remember (recording the weather daily now for 30+ years) and I myself have some experience with met. equipment from my own research in school. We picked up an old Environment Canada Stevenson screen from a local farmer in good condition which needed only a lick of paint and a new base. So my question is... what should we put in/on it?
Met. variables of interest in order of importance:
temp/humidity/pressure
rain/snowfall accumulation
wind speed/direction
net radiation/insolation/UV etc
leaf wetness/ soil moisture etc
So my thinking was, since he has a good base to start from (as well as instrumentation experience) it might be fun to build this up slowly instead of buying a snazzy all-in-one station. Clearly the first purchase is the base station/data logger. My experience has been with multi-use data loggers and LARGE data sets so I'm a bit out of my element for a backyard station. I'm interested in wireless (too many rodent-chewed cables in field-research!!!) and the ability to connect to a computer to quickly make graphs and do some trend analysis. However, a display that doesn't require a computer is a deal-breaker. Expandability is also a must and I'd rather not be stuck with a single manufacturer... unless the consensus is that buying an all-in-one station and adapting it for the S-screen is the way to go.
Also, I thought it might be fun to install some antique temp/pressure operated instruments as backup - is eBay/kijiji my best bet for finding things like this or should I be hitting local flea markets? Where can I find information on older met equipment? Again, my own experience has taught me not to trust even solid-state sealed systems so I thought a backup would be smart and look cool!
Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer!
~jess~
