I've been idly browsing for a home weather station for a while, hoping to contribute to the local sensor network for a region that's got lots of microclimate variation. I saw this one from Seeed Studio today, and was hoping for some reviews and advice. Seeed Studio devices are known for open source software, and I wouldn't mind playing with writing a tie-in for sprinkler system automation so we're not irrigating when it's about to rain. It wouldn't be situated so far from the house that we'd need to use the LoRaWAN feature, though.

Concurrently, we just had an inch of rain dropped on our house in the space of 15 minutes, with winds that were taking down tree branches. The weather report says "light rain", weather stations a mile away continue to indicate that everything is bone dry with quiet air. This rainstorm breaks a nearly month-long drought. I'm finding it nerve-wracking that climate change makes it impossible to use past local weather as a predictor of what to expect for gardening, home maintenance, and outdoor activities, and local weather reports are so inaccurate. So that's (hopefully) where the weather station might come into play.

That being said, any chat about your local conditions and reporting from your station is welcome.

I enjoy a few weather tools. For example, I enjoy
blitzortung that shows live lightning. Currently, you can see a long chain of lighting through eastern Germany and up through Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is expected, since we’ve had very warm weather for a while, and it’s supposed to change to colder weather soon.

But is there a good website that can show me easily the weather front that is currently creating all those lightning strikes? The sites I know only shows vague colors and you can perhaps implicitly see some change in pressure, wind, temperature etc, but nothing that clearly shows an east front where for example you would expect lightning soon.

I was always familiar with tornadoes living close to or in Oklahoma for a vast majority of my life. However, with the odd weather patterns we’re seeing this year producing severe weather, I’ve gone way down the rabbit hole. Watching weather livestreams, subscribing to chasers, the works. Has anyone else been on the bandwagon?