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Comment by ejr | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is curious, the particular station style - box - he has his instruments housed in is called a "Stevenson screen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

It's has double-louvers on all four sides and usually has an opening in the bottom as well. The idea is to protect the instruments from the weather while still allowing plenty of exposure to it.

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It would be a cool project for someone to hook up the instruments with wifi so that twice-daily readings are automatically taken and sent to the Weather Service.

Funny you mention, I did have a similar project on the back burner. The following were all the measurements that were supposed to be sent back in CSV format :

  "station","town","district","lon","lat","elev","temp","dew","humid","mbar","wspeed","wdir","precip","start","end","status"

Lon, lat and elev are longitude, latitude and elevation of course and start, end were UNIX timestamps. I had an idea to have it send data back every 5 minutes to avoid the jet exhaust anomaly problem mentioned in the article. I could safely discard the outliers and store the rest.

Sadly, this never got off the ground as I never had the time to build it.

It's not that hard, CWOP[1] and wview[2] support doing this out of the box. I've got a setup[3] in my parent's place that submits the data regularly to them all the time. That said I'd probably trust this guy more than random weather stations setup by unknown people.

[1] http://wxqa.com/ [2] http://www.wviewweather.com/ [3] http://weather.voots.org/

http://weather.voots.org/ looks pretty good! You got any photos of the setup?

You can find some of these projects from this map: https://thingful.net/?what=weather .

This is exactly how Weather Underground gets lots of it's data. If you select change station you'll see a listing of stations that are not the official observation points for your area.

Also, some of this data can be collected via the APRS amateur radio system.

Also know in NWS speak as a thermoshack.

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