Dr. Amanda Foster

If your weather station has been telling you that last week dropped twice as much rain as your neighbor’s gauge showed, you are not alone. I have run into this exact problem many times testing instruments for citizen science projects. The fix is almost always the same: you calibrate your rain gauge with a known … Read more

By the time you realize your weather station humidity readings are off, you may have already logged days or weeks of bad data. I have helped dozens of home weather station owners diagnose faulty humidity sensors, and the problem almost always comes down to one of a handful of fixable causes. Learning how to troubleshoot … Read more

An anemometer is only as accurate as the spot where you mount it. I have seen expensive sensors produce completely meaningless data simply because they were bolted to the wrong side of a roof or placed too close to a tree line. Wind is one of the most easily disturbed measurements in all of meteorology. … Read more

Keeping a home weather station accurate takes only a few hours each season, but those hours make the difference between trustworthy data and months of garbage readings. I have run personal weather stations for years, and the units I treated with a quick spring and fall check are still going strong while the neglected ones … Read more

I still remember the morning my grandfather glanced at the sky and said, “We’ll be inside by four.” He was right. That moment sparked my obsession with how to read clouds to predict rain, and I’ve spent the last decade refining what he taught me. You don’t need a weather app, radar, or fancy equipment. … Read more

Tracking the sky from your own backyard is one of the oldest, simplest ways to engage with science. When you learn how to keep a daily weather observation log at home, you turn five minutes a day into a record of your local microclimate that grows more valuable every year. You do not need expensive … Read more

A barometer measures the weight of the air above you, and that single number tells a story about the weather heading your way. In our experience working with weather data, learning to interpret barometric pressure trends is one of the fastest skills a local forecaster can pick up. Rising readings point to fair, stable weather, … Read more

If you have ever lost tomatoes to an unexpected frost or battled powdery mildew all summer, learning how to measure dew point and use it in the garden can change the way you plan your season. Dew point is the single best number on a weather report for predicting frost, fungal disease, and how quickly … Read more

I set up my first rain gauge three summers ago, and it almost drove me crazy. My gauge kept reporting double the rainfall that my phone’s weather app showed, and I couldn’t figure out why. After some research and several rounds of repositioning, I finally learned how to measure rainfall accurately in your backyard. The … Read more

Heat waves kill more Americans each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. The CDC reports an average of 702 heat-related deaths annually in the United States. Yet most people rely entirely on regional forecasts that miss hyperlocal conditions by several degrees. I built my first backyard weather station in 2019 after a heat dome … Read more