This is the inaugural Castro Valley Patch Weekend Weather Report with a twist.
What crazy weather we’re having lately, eh? Last week, it was 103.8˚ in the shade and this week, we get almost an inch of rain in one June day! It was, according the professional Meteorologists, supposed to be a "weak front." It was more like a Freak Front! I don’t know about the rest of the Earth, but we’ve definitely got a changing climate here in the SF Bay Area.
In 2008, I installed a backyard weather station and started feeding weather data to the world via Weather Underground.
The equipment I use is: Oregon Scientific WMR968 Wireless Weather Station & AmbientWeather.com’s Virtual Weather Station Internet software.
I receive the data wirelessly into the console and it attaches to an old, slow laptop via a serial cable, which feeds the data to my personal weather website: www.thomascoates.com/weather and also connects to www.weatherunderground.com, so the whole world can see what the weather is like in my backyard.
You can view a weather satellite view of Castro Valley at any time from any place by using this link: http://bit.ly/kVnVYU
I use the radar map during the winter to see when I can miss the rain. You can see all the backyard weather stations on this map. I've added a screenshot of my Dreamland Weather Station Web page, the Weather Underground Web page for Castro Valley and photos of my weather station equipment. If you want some help in setting up your own backyard weather station, please let me know.
As a kid, I was very interested in weather. My first weather station was from Edmund Scientific and, compared to today's equipment, it was very primitive, but I kept track of everything on graph paper. Now, at the end of each year, I upload the data into a spreadsheet.
I'll skip a weekend forecast in this inaugural column since that information already ran in Patch yesterday morning. You can see that forecast by clicking .
Weather Joke of the Week (Sorry, most Weather Jokes are very corny):
Q: What happens when it rains cats & dogs?
A: You have to be careful not to step in a poodle.
Weather Fact of the Week: In 1803 a classification of clouds was made up by Luke Howard (born 1772, died 1864) who used Latin words to describe their characteristics.
Cirrus: tufts or whisps
Stratus: a layer
Nimbus: rain bearing
Cumulus: a heap or pile
