USU's Environmental Observatory

USU has a really nice weather station.... Well, it's more than a weather station. The title "Environmental Observatory" really does it justice. From the web page www.weather.usu.edu, you can have a look at all sorts of data if you are so inclined. For the average use, the home page shows all the basics but if you're the sort of fellow who likes to look at graphs, that's there also. I really like the CO₂ graph because of the correlation to inversions. Same goes for the visibility graph even though fog also reduces the visibility.

One thing I find potentially useful from the home page is the evapotranspiration (ET) near the bottom that can be used to help determine watering schedules. This would probably be more useful to an average person if there was a link or something explaining how to use ET to figure out how much water to give your lawn. OK, I semi lie, there is a link to information about ET but the information given there isn't exactly explicit in how its to be used.

Now the observatory does NOT predict weather, it just reports it as it is happening. For people like me, that's just fine. If I want to know the weather, I look at the barometer on my wall at home, I look out the window, and nine times out of ten (more like 29 out of 30), I get it right for the day! The observatory is just a better tool than what I have at home, and for the scientific minded, it's a great tool!

Here is the next generation in accurate weather prediction...