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Comment by mseepgood | Hacker News Reader

What's the point in doing this? Don't environmental authorities and weather services record this already?

I do it mainly because it is a tradition of the scientific gentry to take measurements and build almanacs. Think Reed’s (nautical) or Wisden (cricket) but on a much more local scale. It’s probably why the article references the fact that their gauge is made of copper — taking pride in a sense of tradition and solidity by using a brassy looking scientific instrument made of metal. My own gauge is plastic but I mounted it on a solid oak stave. We try to follow in the footsteps of Kelvin, hiking to his waterfall with a hardwood case of glass thermometers etc.

I would probably be into steampunk as an aesthetic if it were more hard scifi and less makebelieve. Compared to steampunk bric-à-brac, a copper rain gauge is steam punk science that is actually scientific, as opposed to an iPhone case with brass cogs glued to it.

It serves a practical purpose too — when you have a privet hedge and a lawn to care for and your climate provides rainfall on an intermittent basis, it’s important to know when the soil needs some artificial millimetres on it to keep the foliage going.

Weather is hyper local. In the US precipitation data are generally available at 1km grid resolution through combination of radar, satellite, and ground truth gauges — these are good areal estimates but pretty much always very bad point estimates. There can be problems in data availability, and quality due to all sorts of things like bird migrations, clouds, and gauge malfunctions. Collecting your own data is cheap and easy.

As farmers, my family has always been interested in the weather for good reason. We have a few rain gauges about a mile apart and the difference between them is significant. You might get a tenth of an inch in one place and a half an inch a mile away.

The synthetic precipitation data might be useful on a large, average scale, but it usually doesn't actually provide a particularly accurate measure of what actually happened on your land.

What is the point in doing anything? Why cook, isn't there already cooks that do that? Why program? Isn't there already programmers who program? Why do woodworking? Walmart sells chairs and other wood products? Why do pottery? I can go to Etsy and buy it? Why own a fish tank? There is an ocean with plenty of fish in it? Why garden? There are huge farms that do that?

What a silly question.

Gardening. You can look up stuff for an area, but you might have plants locally with specific needs. Or people with rain catchments.

Our local monsoon season was weeks of great thunderstorms twenty years ago and is now a period of humidity. Stuff like this makes it “real.” Aka resistant to gaslighting.

I think these people are missing the broader implication.

Being?

Taking a look for yourself is king.

What's the point of reading HN, isn't there reddit already?

This started in 1988, too. Data was way more obscure in those days. Probably not really available like now until the 2010s.

I've got a yardstick from 1988. You need a PhD to read it. It's barely euclidean.

They do but sometimes the data are behind walls...

There was some debate three years ago on whether insect populations were declining, with the prime suspect being modern pesticides.

The most solid data source they found in Germany was a local club of enthusiast entomologists who had been collecting bugs using the same traps, locations, and methodology over the past 80+ years.

The answer btw was yes, there was a marked reduction over that time frame.

The "backstory" was on the Reddit post - the data came from OP's father who was recording daily rainfall just because, probably as an odd-ball hobby or a routine. The OP merely packaged it up in a form of a website.

https://www.reddit.com/user/saulhudson80

Maybe it's an epistemological issue. Firshand perception is realer than secondhand abstraction.

Or maybe he just doesn't trust the government.

Rainfall is very, very site specific. So is temperature.

If I drive 1km down the road, the temp goes up 3C in the summer, when it is 35C in the city, and 32C here.

Why? I am close to a river, there are hills around me. Terrain makes a difference.

Sometimes, I can see it rain an few km away, but not here. And the reverse is true, too.

And beyond that, rain is not consistent. It's not as of someone turned on a faucet, and rain is coming from a perfect shower head, all perfectly distributed.

It varies, fluctuates, terrain, makes a difference, for terrain effects wind patterns, causes air to rise or fall, etc etc.

There’s a lot to be said for having less concrete and asphalt around.

This applies especially in the UK, where it can be pouring with rain for an hour where I live, but beautiful sunshine 2 miles away where my brother lives. The country is an island with hills everywhere and a flat east coast. The Met office data doesn't really have the resolution wanted for some people.

The adage if you don't like the weather in the UK, wait 5 minutes, is also perfectly accurate.

Yes. I live on the South Coast and notice temperature changes from driving just a few mile inlands (e.g. in winter, the difference between car windscreens icing up or not).

> The adage if you don't like the weather in the UK, wait 5 minutes, is also perfectly accurate.

I know what you mean, but three or four hours will almost certainly guarantee a change (especially when raining) as this gives westerly fronts from the Atlantic to pass through.

We get strange predictions and dissonance regularly where I live. We barely trust the forecast anymore.

I used to help record weather measurements from a "weather station" in the UK growing up. It's a cultural thing. Lots of cultures don't have the same long term cooperative investments. Their lack of toil evident by their negative impact on society

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