Not since Victorian times has there been such an explosion in weather recording. High quality digital devices in back gardens provide an unrivalled measure of what is happening in your locality.
The extraordinary website, Weather Underground, locates my computer in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, and tells me what the nearest weather stations – there are five within half a mile – are currently recording. This is temperature, wind speed and wind chill, cloud cover, but also visibility, humidity and dew point. Then there is a radar map, on whatever scale you choose, showing where it is actually raining locally or anywhere in the country, and an estimate of when this might reach you. The forecast is updated every hour.
There are all sorts of other bits of very local information such as sunrise and sunset, beginning and end of twilight, as well as nautical twilight and astronomical twilight. There is the length of day and how much longer tomorrow’s daylight will last – at the time of writing, this is an extra one minute and four seconds, a strangely cheering fact.
But perhaps the most ambitious of all is a 10-day weather forecast giving continuous rolling temperature highs and lows, rainfall quantities, cloud cover, wind speeds and atmospheric pressure. How accurate it proves to be requires some study, but it looks impressive.
The US-based organisation measures all these forecasts retrospectively for accuracy against the official US National Weather Service data, and claims to be performing well. And with a growing network of 140,000 weather stations worldwide, it is fast becoming a favourite for weather buffs everywhere.
