WeatherSTEM Fusion

Farmers now have a lot more tools at their disposal to help them gain information about weather patterns and conditions. If you were a farmer, with a WeatherSTEM Unit on your farm, which data could you use to determine if forest cover makes a difference in air temperature, soil temperature, humidity and precipitation? The video tutorial below will show you how to find and use the data from your WeatherSTEM Unit.

Describe the scientific process you would use to collect data to test your hypothesis.

View Transcript

This video will introduce you to the data mining power at your fingertips with WeatherSTEM. From the main menu on any WeatherSTEM page, select the data link. Pick a particular station to mine. The table will list all sensors at this WeatherSTEM location. Each sensor will indicate the specific property being measured, the units by which those properties are measured, and the current reading of that sensor instrument. Users can select as many instruments as they like. For this tutorial, we will select just two sensors; the thermometer and the rain rate. Next, we need to select the time period. Click in the highlighted box to bring up our period calendars. Let’s just take a look at one day, from 6 AM until 10 PM; we need to apply these times to our search. We could select any time interval, for now, we will select by the hour. Now comes the fun part, selecting the output format. Perhaps you want a comma-delimited file you can import into a spreadsheet for analysis. Maybe your prefer a JSON or XML file to use in a computer programming class. Perhaps you need a simple table to put into a report. For now, let’s look at the visual charting capabilities built into WeatherSTEM. But first, let’s review. We have our sensors selected; rain rate and thermometer. Our time period is one day, from 6 AM to 10 PM. We want to select a chart, and we want this time format to be for hourly average readings. Now, let’s see what it looks like. You can even click on points and see the sky overhead at that exact moment. At 10 AM, there was a high temperature of about 84 degrees with bright skies. Learn more about weather data and mining activities in other videos and WeatherSTEM lessons.