A weather station can also give you some quiet time to do other things or just have a cup of tea. You can easily find the tools you need at a garden store, an arts and crafts store, or a hobby store. You can even try making your own electronic instruments once you know how to use the tools you will be using.
What's the meaning?
As you and your kids keep an eye on the readings from your equipment, you might notice that the weather changes as the readings change. If you can keep track of the readings on a chart, write down what the weather looks like and what happened the next day. After a while, you might notice that if a certain string of numbers comes up, the weather is likely to change like it did before.
How weather happens.
Before you go out and buy all the tools and gadgets for your backyard weather station, it's a good idea to know how weather works. So, you can figure out where to put the instruments and how to use them. You can also figure out what you might want to add to the station as the kids and adults learn. The sun and its heat are the main source of weather. When the heat hits the earth, it warms up the land and water. The earth and water heat up, which makes the air rise. Depending on how warm the land and water get, the air rises faster, creating wind when it meets air that was once warm but is now cool and falling back to earth to be warmed again.
The process is uneven across a land mass, and the earth is spinning, so there are places with high pressure and places with low pressure. This is because the air rises and falls at different rates, and different things are mixed in with the air (water vapor.) As the earth spins, the ground and water heat up, the air rises and falls, picking up things like water droplets and moisture, and the temperature changes. High pressure areas and low pressure areas move around the world. This makes fronts, which are places where the pressures change. A weather station does more than tell you what to wear every day. It also tells you whether a front is coming, here, or leaving based on temperature, humidity, wind speed, and direction.
The music making.
Ok, so it's simple, but that's about all there is to it. Now you can start to figure out where in the cycle your backyard is. If you put a thermometer in the shade, you'll get a good idea of how hot or cold it is. You can make one yourself or get a good one at a hardware store. If you want to make one, you might want to look at a site that tells you how to do it, but in short, you buy a glass tube with a one-inch diameter, fill it with mercury until it's 32 inches high, and get all the air out. Or you can buy one, since this isn't something a child could do. With an anemometer, you can find out how fast the wind is blowing. This tool has four half-ping-pong balls on sticks that are connected in the shape of a cross. It usually has a weather vane on top so you can tell which way the wind is blowing.
A barometer and a rain gauge are the last two pieces of equipment you'll need. The barometer shows whether the pressure in the air is going up or down. If the barometer goes up, it means good weather is coming, and if it goes down, it means bad weather. The rain gauge is just a 1 inch plastic tube with marks on the sides to show how deep the water is. It needs to be put somewhere open where wind is less likely to blow in more rain.
