Being just outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin puts me in a humid continental climate. This means we see extremes in temperature including triple digit temperatures in summer. In winter, our normal high temperatures are below freezing and wind chills down to -30F are common. The “humid” part of our climate does in fact mean lots of humidity, rain, and snow too. Living so close to Lake Michigan means our weather is also influenced by it. The lake effect and a bit of urban heat island effect from a large sprawling city like Milwaukee create a microclimate here that keeps temperatures a little cooler in summer and warmer in winter than surrounding areas. It also bumps me up to a growing Zone of 5b.
I set up a weather station in August of 2011. My particular model is an Ambient Weather WS-1090 Wireless Home Weather Station w/ Data Logging & Atomic Time
This is a picture of the sensor array, while it was strapped to the grape arbor during the first week.
I don’t use the software that came with the unit. Instead, I installed the free Cumulus software which streams information to wunderground for me so that it’s available online. There aren’t any instructions, so of you are trying to get yours working under Configuration choose Station and select Fine Offset/Watson/MyDel etc as your station type. The second step is to choose Configuration again and select Internet. On the bottom right is a box for weather underground. Click the enabled box then enter your station number assigned by wunderground and your usual wunderground password.
http://www.wunderground.com/swf/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=english&station=KWIWESTA5
