The Windsor C-1 school district now boasts its own weather monitoring system. Located on the roof directly above the high school library staircase, the visible unit can precisely measure temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed and much more.

Thanks to a grant from Midwest Bank and the Missouri Department of Conservation, accurate meteorological information is readily available to anyone at anytime. The live forecast is available on Weather Underground. 

The weather unit, maintained by teacher John Darmody, updates several times a minute, giving real time weather information directly at Windsor High School.

“It’s really good for sports, too,” Darmody said. “It can detect lightning within a 25 mile radius, which is good because lightning strikes can be up to 8 miles long.”

The system can also predict and identify weather patterns for the next 10 days. This is also convenient, as it gives students up-to-date information on the weather, and they can plan accordingly.

“I think it’s fairly useful because it helps the district prepare for bad conditions,” junior Sean Raglin said.

So far, students, parents, and anyone with an Internet connection can view temperature, wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, air pressure, visibility, clouds, dew point, humidity, rainfall, snow (if applicable), sunrise and sunset times, moon phase, and elevation, plus all of this information for the next 10 days.  It even will tell you how much shorter or longer daylight will for upcoming days.

“I knew we had a weather system since (Mr.) Darmody sometimes talks about it in Conservation Ecology class, but I didn’t know it was that comprehensive,” Raglin said.

Another use for the station is that it logs previous data, giving thorough and extensive data, benefiting science-savvy teachers and students, as well as providing an abundance of information for statistics students. The device can even be used for politics (or literally political ‘science’ in this case), to an extent, as it can present a source to prove or disprove climate change.

The weather system is currently up and running. The future plans for the unit is to not only help students and staff plan the day, but to provide daily forecasts in the morning announcements; one of the ideas was to also give a weekend forecast at the end of the last school day of the week. This routine will most likely be dubbed the “Windsor Weather Watch.”