One could begin to refer to Ken Eddy and Jim Webster as
professional hobbyists, what with the list of ventures they have
taken on over the years.

Webster has dabbled in candle-making, metal-detecting and has
most recently tried his hand at brewing beer while Eddy has a
passion for buying junk cars and turning them into eye candy.

The two friends who work together at the American Refining Group
packaging plant have now put on the meteorologist caps and turned
to the weather to fill their downtime.

With a small amount of equipment, a console, a computer and an
Internet connection, Eddy and Webster have put Sleepy Hollow and
Duke Center on the national radar through www.wunderground.com.

“I have always followed the weather, but never been into it this
much until I started my weather station,” said Eddy.

“I bought some equipment that is set up in the yard. The data
sensors are all wireless and send information to a console in the
house. The console, via USB, transfers the data to the computer
which then uploads it to the wunderground site,” he explained.

“Ken’s has more bells and whistles than mine, but they do
basically the same thing,” said Webster.

“Besides the equipment, which can run anywhere from $150 to
$6,000 it’s all free. All you do is set it up, then put in your
location. Wunderground then sends you a call sign and you are ready
to go,” Webster explained.

“We are just novices though,” stated Eddy. “We have taken to
calling one another ‘Beaufort’ after the Beaufort Scale of Wind
which sets up things on a twelve-point scale.”

Fortunately for the two, even novices now have a way of being
heard by the public. They even get to sign their name to their
station site through customization of graphs.

“You can customize the Web site any way that you want,” said
Webster. “The graph lines can be color-coded and set up however you
like.”

The stations on wunderground are location specific so while the
information that Eddy puts up could approximately represent the
weather in Derrick City, it may be better to take a gander at
Webster’s site from Duke Center.

“My station measures wind gusts, direction, temperature,
rainfall, moon phases, sunrise and sunset, ultraviolet radiation
levels and even has a forecast icon just for Sleepy Hollow. When I
look at Jim’s it’s usually exactly the same – maybe a degree off in
temperature,” said Eddy.

Ever wondered what the average rainfall for the area was during
a very rainy month or how about the average temperature of say,
February 2007 when things seemed too cold to bear?

“18.3 degrees according to my station. That about matches the
gas bill,” Eddy chuckled.

“The neat thing about this is that while it does store the
information to my computer, it also stores it on the Web site, so I
can go back and pull up graphs from months, probably even years
ago,” he continued.

Eddy also has a site of his own through Verizon where there are
links to his weather statistics, forecast for the area, Doppler
radar and his wunderground station.

“I recently switched to DSL which loads everything a lot
faster,” Eddy said. “The information from my console automatically
updates the site every twenty minutes, 24 hours a day.”

“But the information does take up quite a bit of memory space on
your computer,” Webster chimed in. “Mine updates the site every
five minutes, and you can have it set to continuously update, but
it really takes up quite a bit of room when you get into that.”

While the computer does all of the work after set-up, the
initial phase of getting the data sensors in the right places
happens to be a little bit tricky.

“There are standards by which the equipment has to be set up,
but sometimes it is impossible to get it exactly right. For
instance, the anemometer is supposed to be thirty feet off the
ground which I can’t really do,” explained Eddy.

After things are set-up as near close to standards as possible,
there can still be issues with inclement weather.

“Freezing rain causes problems for these things and sometimes if
there’s enough snow it can get jammed in the anemometer so I have
to go warm it up and blow the snow off of the propellers,” said
Webster.

Neighbors can also cause unexpected glitches in the
readings.

“I had a neighbor come down and pour a jug of water in my rain
gauge which made the reading that we had six inches of rain in one
day,” laughed Eddy. “He must have been pouring it just right
because those things are difficult to manipulate.”

Trickery, it seems, is another alluring hobby.

For all the time spent talking about the weather and analyzing
it, Eddy and Webster do not look at themselves as
professionals.

“We got our equipment from magazines and stores that anyone can
look into. The computer does all of the work – it’s really a simple
thing,” said Eddy.

“The guys at work come in and joke with us, wanting to know the
forecast. We tell them: ‘We don’t predict the weather, we study
it.'”