If you have been doing some research already on a weather station for your school, you will have seen there are various weather stations on the market that are able to store data on a PC for later analysis, to create graphs, generate summaries, and more. There are two weather stations that we recommend for use in education: the Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 range, and the Davis Instruments Vantage Vue. Other models are too basic, not robust enough thus their longevity is short, and do not give the accuracy required.

Our Top Recommendations for School Weather Stations

Davis

For most uses, its best to take a pragmatic view of where to install your weather station. Bear in mind that you want readings for your location 'warts and all', and not a open space somewhere else. Very often the location will be affected by the local urban, commercial, geographic and vegetation topography.

Temperature and Humidity Sensor

Your temperature and humidity sensors are best located in a shaded environment out of direct sunlight and weather. The north facing side of a wall or fence is good, but bear in mind radiated heat from an occupied building. A purpose-made screen will help, or even a home-made one such as a white ice cream tub with ventilation holes. Force ventilating the screen will further improve accuracy and response.

If you have to mount it in a sunny location, then shade it behind something e.g. a shiny biscuit tin lid painted black on the reverse.

We often receive calls from schools who remember having a Stephenson Screen in their school grounds as a child which is where they went to get the temperature readings. We still agree that this is a valuable way of enhancing your students experience of weather, however there is only so much you can measure in this way - temperature and humidity!

Therefore the benefit that electronic, or Automated Weather Stations (AWS), provide students is enormous. As discussed earlier AWS can be used in meteorology (as part of Geography), science and technology, maths, communications and media, and ICT.

We are often informed that weather data for all areas of the UK and world can be gained so easily from the world-wide web, so why would you use your budget to purchase an AWS for your school or educational establishment?

One teacher who had purchased from us summed it up well: He had been using an online weather data source for several years, then one day he went to it  it was no

One of the most important things anyone wanting to understand the weather can learn is how to recognise the salient features shown on a weather map.

The first thing a meteorologist will draw up on his or her chart (although nowadays nearly all maps are generated automatically by computers) are lines of equal pressure from observations. These are usually in millibars (mb) or sometimes inches.

We call lines joining points of equal pressure isobars. They are helpful because by creating them we can start to identify areas of high and low pressure at both the surface and aloft, that control our weather pattern. Pressure values are generally corrected to Mean Sea Level Pressure (MSLP) so that a standardised level can be shown, otherwise the observers height would affect the readings, as pressure decreases with altitude quite substantially.

The chart below shows a map with pressure readings taken from