Tempest.

Even though my birthday is over a month away, Jamie, Chris, and Mike gave me my birthday present. Mike kindly installed it yesterday. It’s a Tempest Weatherflow weather station.

I’ve had my eye on this weather station for a while. As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m fascinated by weather, and the guys thought it’d be best if I had my birthday present before Monsoon Season starts up later this month.

As a trained Weather Spotter for the National Weather Service, I’m excited about this piece of hardware installed on our roof. I’ve already given the family the weather stats for the hour several times today and I’ve been playing around with the incoming data and the like. I’ve also started contributing to Weather Underground. I was excited to see the number of weather stations in our neighborhood, and I’m happy to be contributing our data to the mix.

Mike was able to use an old DirecTV mount for the weather station so that made installation easy. It’s solar powered, so I don’t need to climb up there to change the batteries like the old days when we lived in Central New York. And this weather station has real-time data, so I’ll be able to see how high the wind gusts actually are as a storm is rolling through. Plus, this provides lightning detection with a roughly 40 km radius.

In addition to our station stats in Weather Underground, I’ll probably end up putting a widget somewhere on the page here to share our weather data. I love this stuff!