☽ The Weather Witch

Old and New, Coexisting

A look at how the old ways and modern instruments share space here.

A blend of old and new weather instruments set up indoors
I have created a blend of both the old ways and the new ways indoors...
A blend of old and new weather instruments set up outdoors
...and outdoors.

The Old Ways

A Galileo thermometer
A Galileo thermometer, because sometimes the old ways are just very elegant physics. The glass bubbles float or sink depending on the density of the liquid around them, and whichever bubble hovers lowest while still floating marks the current temperature. No batteries, no app, no calibration — just glass, water, and four hundred years of getting it right.
A Goethe barometer
A Goethe barometer, named for the poet who was as fascinated by weather glasses as he was by verse. Rising air pressure pushes water down into the sealed bulb; falling pressure lets it climb the spout — a quiet warning that a storm is on its way, often hours before my modern sensors say the same thing.
A heron statue that doubles as a rain gauge, with a glass tube marked with measurement lines
She looks like garden decor, but tucked against her is a glass rain gauge, marked with measurement lines so I can see exactly how much has fallen. Old ways and new ways alike, everyone appreciates a rain gauge with a little personality.
A storm approaching, photographed from the front porch
Don't forget to watch the sky! Storms make themselves visually known too. I took this picture from my front porch just a few hours before I was tornado warned.

The New Ways

An Ambient Weather WS-2000 outdoor weather station
My Ambient Weather WS-2000 outdoor sensor array — temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure, all read automatically and sent inside without me ever stepping into the yard. It's the modern counterpart to my Goethe barometer, and yes, it's usually right.
The indoor console display for the WS-2000 weather station
The console that lives inside, translating everything the WS-2000 collects outside into readable numbers — indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, wind, rain totals, and pressure trends, updated continuously. It's the same information my old-ways instruments hint at, just delivered a little faster.
A Midland weather alert radio
My Midland weather alert radio — it doesn't care if the power or the internet is out, it will still shriek at me the moment NOAA issues a warning for my county. Not glamorous, but it's earned its spot on the shelf next to everything else that keeps me a step ahead of the sky.
An Ambient Weather lightning detector
My Ambient Weather lightning detector, wired into the same console as the rest of the station. I've got tall trees close to the house, so knowing exactly when lightning is nearby — not just that a storm is somewhere in the county — matters a lot to me. This one tells me both how close a strike was and whether the strikes are getting closer to me.