My Passion With Dan Pearson

It started with a bit of leftover birthday money. I couldn’t decide what to spend it on – the usual clothes or a DVD boxset maybe.

But being an IT manager, I love playing about with data, so when I spotted a weather station device advertised at a reduced rate, I saw it as a bit of an exciting challenge.

The weather station itself does everything you’d expect – registers temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, pressure and rainfall.

But I’ve set it up so it transmits the data wirelessly to my computer and have created a website where the data can be uploaded and stored.

It’s early days as the website has not been running for too long and there are tweaks I want to make, including improved graphs and charts.

But at the moment it has live readings displaying data to within the last 15 minutes.

In that way, it is a ‘current’ resource, but is also a record of historical weather data.

So, as well as checking what the temperature is today – and, perhaps more importantly, what it FEELS like as that can be a degree or two lower in the winter season! – people can visit the site to review the weather stats and figures from six and 24 hours ago, as well as readings for the last week, month and year.

The work I’ve done on the weather station project has only taken up a few spare hours in the evenings and at weekends.

It’s a good way to de-stress – but having said that, my job sees me spending quite a lot of time programming and using coding and I enjoy that, so it follows that my hobby is based around similar skills and interests!

Personal weather stations are often operated just for the owner’s enjoyment and learning, but some share their data with others and this is what I’m looking to do via the website.

Longer term, I plan to develop it further by linking it to my Twitter feed so I can get the information I am compiling out to more people by using social media.

It was my wife who inspired me as she’s always checking weather channels to see whether she needs to take an umbrella to work or wear boots and wrap up warm before leaving the house.

Now I can help by telling her it is two degrees outside with a strong wind chill, so she may want to take a scarf and hat!

I’d like to spread the benefits further, too, by possibly installing a weather station on top of Claremont Hospital where I work.

By sharing the uploaded information I receive from the work and home weather stations with the Met Office, this will help increase the accuracy of weather readings and predictions for Sheffield overall which could see my project become a really useful community resource.

All of which could mean that birthday money goes a lot further than some new socks or a night in watching DVDs!