Beer box keeps an eye on the weather

LAURA RICHARDS/Rangitikei Mail

WEATHER MAN: Peter Marcroft.

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An upside down beer box painted white shields a simple weather station in Turakina.

"It is a bit of kiwi ingenuity," said long time weather watcher Pete Marcroft, of Edenmore Road.

Mr Marcroft said his interest in weather probably started with a book on clouds that his father had.

He was a teenager when the family lived at Manapouri in Fiordland.

He noticed "a big change in weather" from the North Island to the South Island.

Mr Marcroft's father got a job at a power station and he thought "it was like going into a different world" with the move.

Mr Marcroft has had his weather station in Turakina for the past 12 months and has it linked to a web page.

He calls his version "the low end" of the price scale, but he hopes to up-scale within a year now that he has bought a better computer.

Mr Marcroft said the weather station monitors wind speed and direction with an anemometer, humidity, a barometer, temperature and chill-factor and has a self-dumping rain-gauge at the top of the beer crate.

A wireless link feeds the information into the computer and with a programme invented by a New Zealander called Weather Display, the information is put into a variety of formats, including graphs.

That information is then streamed into a web page at www.weatherlive.co.nz. The site also includes links to other weather stations.

He has hits on his website from Britain, the United States, Australia, but mostly from around New Zealand.

Mr Marcroft said he gets emails from people around the region who use his website prior to travelling or before going offshore fishing.