The Weather Blog

Indoor humidity affects your health, your comfort and even your furniture. Here is how to read a hygrometer and act on what it shows, room by room.

It is not a fault. Sun, surface, height and airflow can make two thermometers metres apart read several degrees apart. Here is what is really going on.

An anemometer tells you how fast the wind blows; a wind vane tells you where it comes from. Here is why the two instruments answer completely different questions.

Most bad weather data is not caused by faulty equipment but by where and how it is placed. These are the five siting and handling mistakes that quietly wreck readings.

A barometer that drifts or sticks usually has a simple, fixable cause. Here are the seven most common reasons home barometers go wrong, and exactly what to do about each.

Those swirling lines and triangular symbols on a weather map are a language. Once you can read it, a single chart tells you the whole story of the coming weather.

Sharing your station’s data to networks like Weather Underground and the Ambient network is free, easy, and turns your hobby into something useful to others. Here’s how it works.

Measuring air temperature accurately is far harder than it looks, and most home stations get it wrong for one avoidable reason. Here’s what’s really going on.

Two centuries old and still in daily use, the Beaufort scale lets you estimate wind speed just by watching the world around you. Here’s how it works and why it endures.

High pressure, low pressure, and the speed of the change between them are the atmosphere’s early-warning system. Here’s how to read the signals.

Humidity sensors drift more than any other, and a wrong reading quietly corrupts your dew point and comfort data. The salt test checks one in an afternoon, for free.

Not all rain gauges measure the same way, and each design has blind spots. Here’s how the common types work and which one suits a home weather watcher.

The oldest weather instrument still in daily use, the wind vane looks simple but hides some clever physics — and reads in a way that trips up newcomers.

Wind is the measurement most ruined by poor placement. Here’s how high to mount your anemometer, how far from obstructions, and the compromises real backyards force.

Even a good weather station drifts and mis-reads if you don’t check it. This is a practical, sensor-by-sensor calibration routine you can run in an afternoon.

Three different ways to talk about moisture in the air, and they answer three different questions. Understanding which is which makes weather data far easier to interpret.

The single most useful weather skill a barometer gives you isn’t the number — it’s the trend. Here’s how rising and falling pressure translates into what the sky is about to do.

Davis, Ambient Weather, Ecowitt and Tempest dominate the home weather station market, and they take very different approaches. Here’s an honest look at what each does well and where each falls short.

Hectopascals, inches of mercury, millibars — barometers come labelled in several units and it’s easy to get lost. This guide untangles them and explains what the numbers actually tell you.

A barometer is only useful once it’s calibrated to your altitude. Here’s how to set both an aneroid dial and a digital barometer correctly, using a reliable local reference.