The Weather Outside May Be Frightful, But at Least the News Arrives Wirelessly

The Great Freeze of '07 is over, and now it's Summer in February. Ninety degrees in the backyard yesterday; a mere 89 degrees today. What is the world coming to? Apparently these February temperatures are breaking records -- most last set in the 1970s -- much like the record cold of a mere three weeks ago!

As weird as it is, the warm weather makes for easy gardening, helps one get stuff in the ground early enough to enjoy it for early summer. Of course a warm February usually means a cold, wet, even snowy spring around here and the local mountains. Except when it means a warm dry spring, or the occasional warm wet spring. See, our weather has always been a little, well, variable. Just not quite this variable.

Well, if you are interested in the weather in our backyard, now you can check up on us anytime you feel like it. With some Christmas money this year I indulged in a long standing wish and installed a small, professional grade weather station in our back yard. ( I went with Oregon Scientific WMR 968 largely because of its solar powered sensors.) Temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, rainfall etc. all reported wirelessly to the base station in the house, along with indoor temperature and humidity.

The wireless receiver with all the readouts is cool enough, but it attaches to the home computer and feeds its data to WeatherUnderground.com. So if you want to see how the weather is over here, you can check for yourself online.

Click on over to www.weatherunderground.com and search on "pasadena, ca" or just use this this link. If you like charts and graphs (I find the barometric strip chart particularly interesting) go view our historical data page here. The weekly and monthly charts are pretty fun!

It's nice to be able to get the weather info from inside the house, without having to run outside to get the rainfall information from a physical meter, or read an outdoor thermometer. And it's kind of fun playing with all the features of the weather software.

Wonder what the weather will be like next week? Tornadoes?