Meteorology
I've been interested in weather for a long time. Once I moved to Austin, the weather really began to fascinate me. Now that I'm Colorado, I've paid even more attention to thunderstorms and precipitation - especially after the fires of last summer. I recently installed a very cool weather station on my roof, so I can monitor temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction. I've got about a month's worth of data. Here's a graph of from a few days ago when we got some rain.
The temperature scale is on the left and the barometer (heavy dark line) scale is on the right. The rainfall scale (choppy gray line) is not shown, but the big spike around 3 P.M. on Wednesday was about 0.22 inches over a five minute period (!!). The periodic bumps on the "Inside Temperature" curve are from my monitor kicking on; I've got the sensor located just above the monitor, which I should probably change.
I working on designing and building a field mill, a device that measures the electric field at the ground. This is part of my research on thunderstorm electrification. I hope to have it ready by year's end, and I hope to take a trip to the Langmuir lab near Ruidoso, New Mexico to get it calibrated. Of course, pictures and updates will appear here.
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