First Steps
The UK has an obsession with the weather. Along with fish and chips, tea and football, that is one of the biggest cliches about our country. As with so many cliches, however, there is a grain of truth hiding amongst the mythology: in a country where the weather is quite capable of changing from blinding sun to pouring rain, hail and snow in the space of an hour or less, it is hardly surprising that the subject frequently makes an appearance in conversation.
Having spent most of my childhood in the UK, it is therefore unsurprising that I developed a strong interest in meteorological phenomena at a young age.
As this is the first post here, I am going to take the opportunity to tell you a bit about myself; where I come from, who I am, and why this project has come about. The intention is that this will provide some context for what is to come, and remove the need for further explanation of my motives in future posts. This will probably be the exception rather than the rule: I am a private person by nature.
The Early Years
I was not born in Britain. In fact I was born thousands of miles away, and moved here at the age of two. Shortly after this time, an early memory is of lying in a meadow, looking up at the sky and contemplating the shapes of the cumulus clouds drifting overhead: dragons, seahorses, mystical beasts of all shapes, sizes and natures engaged in a mortal battle to retain their forms, but constantly drifting apart and reconvening in new and exciting patterns.
Rain has also always been one of my great loves. Whether out in the midst of a thunder storm, sitting in a greenhouse with rain hammering on the roof, re-potting seedlings, or lying in a tent being lulled to sleep by the rain on the roof, there is something truly magical about the fall of rain drops from on high.
Sailing and a love of the sea also came at a young age, with Arthur Ransom’s Swallows and Amazons series of books inspiring the purchase of my first sailig dinghy. From there, my interest in the weather took on a new significance, as what the meteorological gods decided to throw at us determined if and when sailing would be possible.
The Beginnings of Obsession
When I was about 12, a friend gave me a book in which to record weather observations, with one square for each day and the idea that an observation would be made at the same time every day and the result inserted into the relevant square. Little did they know that, with that gift, they had sparked what can only be described as an obsession. For the next nine years, every morning I would make my weather observation and record the result. This started off being a simple reading from an outdoor thermometer, an estimate of wind speed and direction, and cloud cover, and a statement of whether or not it was raining, but over the years became more and more complex, with pressure and pressure trend, cloud types and heights, humidity, dew point, and various othermeasurements joining those first five. In the end, my morning observations matched what would be reported by a Met Office weather station for the amount of detail, if not for accuracy.
This commitment presented some problems, however. Firstly, on the occasions when I was away from home, which became more frequent over time, the question arose of whether I left gaps in the data or made observations from alternate locations. I opted for the latter, but this caused obvious problems from a consistency point of view. Secondly, once I left home and started moving around all over the country, my ability to carry large amounts of meteorological equipment with me was greatly reduced, meaning that in the final year or so of observations, I was forced to return to the most basic of measurements. This situation was not one that I was happy with, but it was a necessity, so I put up with it.
Ireland
The start of university presented one of the greatest challenges from a weather recording point of view. Living in halls, it was not going to be possible even to find a suitable location for a thermometer, and the built up nature of the area meant that even making estimates regarding the wind was likely to be very difficult. A cloud diary would have been possible, but after what had come before it seemed a poor substitute, so my manual weather observations drew to a close in the Autumn of 2022.
As luck would have it, however, my family chose that time to move to rural Ireland, presenting the perfect opportunity to build something more permanent and effective. I spent the next few months researching how to run a personal weather station which would allow me to transmit the weather data to myself in the UK. This was by no means simple, as an interest in digital privacy and security meant that many of the most popular options were off the cards due to the requirements to purchase subscriptions from the manufacturers in order to access data remotely.
I finally settled on the ClimeMet CM2000, a Fine Offset manufactured weather station with the ability to transfer weather data to a computer using a USB cable, along with a Raspberry Pi running CumulusMX weather software. This then presented another problem, as the internet setup in the location in question did not allow port forwarding, meaning that manually downloading the data would not be possible. In the end, the only solution that would be reliable enough for my needs was to get a simple webhosting plan and upload the relevant weather logs to that.
So here we are. With a webhost sitting around, it felt like a waste not to make use of it for something more than just hosting zips of weather data, so I modified and uploaded the default CumulusMX website. After that, some kind of blog felt like a small step, so that quickly followed, making use of the Hugo static site generator.
If you are still reading this, I hope you enjoy whatever posts may come in future.