Hi, I am a teacher, and also a miller of flour at a 200 yr old windmill outside Southampton in Hampshire. I must confess that my wind speed is measured by the hi-tech device commonly called a tale-tale, a 200mm long piece of canvas, that when the sweeps of the canvas sails are motionless, will flutter vaguely in the direction that wind is flowing. It has the benefit of being able to be rotated through an arc of 22 meters diameter, with the pivot some 13 meters above the top of Bursledon Hill. I can also rotate the device, slowly with a continuous chain gear, through 360 degrees, though it is unfortunately attached to six and a half tons of oak, cedar and canvas cap, so I try to avoid such manoeuvres.
Ok, so I am not exactly a hi tech user… but I want to get school children visiting the site to be able to do some physics, and thought an online site would be an ideal solution. In the past we have tried very cheap and nasty hand held Anemometers. However, money is tight in the museum trade, and they only worked at Beaufort scale 4 and above, when we mill. The best place to get a reading is from the edge of our reefing stage, but alas, it also the best place to get a free haircut from our sails on a windy day. Talking about wind, our wind vanes blew off, we regularly get the best of the gales in our molinotope, which is a nice tree lined north - south avenue now.
Can anybody suggest a nice site close by to divert my school children too?
You can look at weather for the area at http://www.isleofwightweather.com/live/mml/. If you click on the Southampton Weather Centre dot you can see recent weather data for that station http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/EGHI.html. I don’t know if that’s anywhere near you, but it seems to be the closest that’s available. The area map might be interesting to look at to try to spot trends or check what weather is heading your way.
Wow, all the data from the weather station at Southampton, and from a US site. I suppose i should not have put UK only in the Google search engine :lol:… fear of finding New Hampshire data only!
Maybe check the WD World Map http://wdworldmap.com/ to see if there are any stations near your location. Click on UK to bring up the Europe map. It’s a rather large map, but it shows enough detail you should be able to locate stations near you if they have sent me their URL.
Thank you for the link to Ian Dickson’s site at Clanfield, guess I will have to try and persuade the Museum to install some equipment if I can. Looks like the Dutch and the English seem to be the most obsessed with the weather in Europe from that map…
Hi, I am a teacher, and also a miller of flour at a 200 yr old windmill outside Southampton in Hampshire. I must confess that my wind speed is measured by the hi-tech device commonly called a tale-tale, a 200mm long piece of canvas, that when the sweeps of the canvas sails are motionless, will flutter vaguely in the direction that wind is flowing. It has the benefit of being able to be rotated through an arc of 22 meters diameter, with the pivot some 13 meters above the top of Bursledon Hill. I can also rotate the device, slowly with a continuous chain gear, through 360 degrees, though it is unfortunately attached to six and a half tons of oak, cedar and canvas cap, so I try to avoid such manoeuvres.