What the weather will do is a question everyone asks. That is why television forecasters are able to make an honest living. However, they cannot often predict what will happen in an exact location because they have to cover a large area in order to be useful to more than a handful of viewers.
Often people compensate for this by simply looking out the window. A good addition to this solution, though, is to have one or more barometers around the house. A barometer helps gauge the air pressure in a location. Any meteorologist will tell you that air pressure is a determining factor in what the weather actually does – in fact, all weather stations have barometers to help them determine this very information.
Air pressure can be measured in several different ways. A simple barometer can be built at home by using a plate, some Popsicle sticks, and a used soda bottle. All one needs to do is put some water into the bottle and suspending it on the plate, using the Popsicle sticks, so that some of the water falls back into the plate. When the water levels balance out, a baseline for local air pressure will have been established.
While this is a standard science fair way of measuring atmospheric pressure, a proper barometer is far more accurate – and less apt to break with even the slightest bump.
Barometers can be made using hydrostatic pressure or by a number of other means. Whatever the particular method, keeping track of the air pressure at an exact location is a great help in determining what the weather will do at that specific place.
