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You might wonder… how I come up with the daily forecasts here on the Walters Post. Well to start things off, I don’t put much stock in fancy smartphone apps, and I have even less use for some corporate forecaster sitting in a glass tower 80 miles away, reading numbers off a screen he’s never had to step outside to verify.

Every prediction I give you is built from scratch, right here, using real-time data from my own Met One Instruments Met Station One.

Getting it up and running was never something I could have managed alone. If it weren’t for my son Karl, this whole operation would still be a notebook and a finger in the wind — which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad backup plan. Karl’s the high-tech one in the family. He did the heavy lifting: running cables, untangling wiring diagrams, and somehow convincing the whole system to talk properly to the computer. I mostly handed him things and tried not to interfere.

It’s been running now for over 15 years. It only missed a beat once — last winter, when frost heave shifted the ground and snapped the line running up the sensor tower. When it warmed up some I went out, patched it back together.

So for those that might be interested. Here’s what that setup delivers to my desk every morning:

Wind — A rugged three-cup anemometer and vane, set true to north, tracking speeds up to 50 m/sec with roughly ±2% accuracy. It gives me an early read on shifting systems before they announce themselves any other way. The wind always knows something before the rest of the sky does.

Temperature & Humidity — Housed in a radiation shield, so the sun can’t cook the sensors into lying to me, these instruments hold true ambient temperature to within ±0.5°C. That’s what lets me catch an overnight frost or a morning fog before it settles in and catches everyone else off guard.

Barometric Pressure — The real bread and butter. When the pressure drops, you reach for a slicker. When it rises, you can expect clearing skies and a better day to be alive. Simple as that, and it hasn’t changed since before any of us had smartphones or any other fancy gadget.

But here’s the thing: solid as that station is, I don’t just stare at screens.

You see, a machine will tell you what is happening, but it won’t always tell you what’s coming next. For that, I still rely on what the sky itself is saying. I watch how high the birds are flying. I notice how the leaves turn over before a storm rolls in, as a little flip that’s as reliable as any barometer I own. And I also pay attention to the colour a sunset leaves behind, when the day is done, because the sky has been making predictions a lot longer than I have.

So between Karl’s handiwork, and over 15 years of steady data, and a set of instincts that were old when the station was new, I’ve got about as good a setup as any backyard forecaster could reasonably hope for. Put them all together, and most days you’ll get a forecast worth trusting.

Of course, in saying all that… Mother Nature has a way of keeping a man humble regardless of how much equipment he’s got. I can still be wrong … and now, and then I am. But when I miss, it’s an honest miss, made right here on my own ground, with my own eyes, and nobody else to blame.

Which is, I suppose, exactly how it should be.

Until the next time: Keep Your Minds Open and Your Stories Alive! GW