I'm "Anemometerless"?

Suffering From Weather Forecasting Withdrawal Syndrome...


My regular readers probably remember that seven weeks ago today the Turbo Pup Compound was bombarded with not one but two massive hail storms which came through within a couple of hours of each other. (We had another exciting afternoon today with severe storms all around us and a couple more inches of rain coming down.)

Besides beating most of the little "gravelly thingies" off of the shingles on my roof, the earlier hail also made mince meat out of my freshly planted garden and destroyed a bird feeder and finally...

IT BROKE THE ANEMOMETER ON MY WIRELESS BACK YARD WEATHER STATION.

Seriously, it broke two of the three little "wind cups" off of the body of the weather vane telling me the wind speed and direction.  Since that day I've been blind to what the wind is doing unless I actually walk outside and stick a moistened finger into the air stream.

So any way, I went to the trouble doing the original installation to design and build a 20' tall mast for the weather station components including a relative humidity sensor, a digital thermometer, and a self clearing rain gauge module, and although the rest of the system still works I don't want to abandon the wind speed measurement capability because that singular function is probably the most interesting thing it tells me unless we get 4 inches of rain in 15 minutes some day.

For some weird reason the manufacturer sells all of the replacement components...EXCEPT the anemometer... so I guess that later this summer I'm going to be forced to buy another entire system from them to replace the Hail damaged component.

If I hold out and play my cards right I have a birthday coming up in September--Pat gave me the existing system as a present for Christmas a few years ago--and now I have my eye on a similar upgraded compatible system by the same manufacturer which will work in parallel with the existing components and will allow me to connect the incoming data stream to one of my spare laptop computers.

Before you know it I wouldn't be surprised if representatives of NASA and NOAA could be stopping by my house and Jim Cantori with the Weather Channel would come calling to get free copies of my local weather data base and interview me on "Storm Stories" some evening.

Until then, I have to go now and continue my shopping and weather metrics system design efforts...Y'all have a LOVELY day now...If you will...