Weather Gadgets: Tracking a gift that dad will love

It’s been 40-plus years since self-described weather geek Bruce Telfeyan saved his pennies to send away for a weather vane and wind gauge.

“It was fantastic,” he recalls of his days twisting the dials and tracking wind speeds and directions.

Fast forward a few decades to a Father’s Day, when Telfeyan received one of those newfangled indoor-outdoor remote thermometers from his wife.

But step into Telfeyan’s backyard, and his present to himself far eclipses the gauges he mounted atop the third-story roof of his childhood home.

He is among an estimated 30 Omaha metro-area residents who have what qualify as full-fledged weather stations at their homes.

While the old-fashioned rain gauge and mercury thermometer still are reliable, they have been superseded in many homes by remotely read gauges. Telfeyan’s setup is on the far end of sophisticated.

In addition to temperature, rainfall and wind, his system computes wind chill and heat index, has battery backup and a solar panel, weighs the rain and is self-emptying, and even has a little fan that blows across the thermometer so that it doesn’t record the temperature as overly hot.

Telfeyan posts his data online, and his readings are entered into a national database kept by the Citizen Weather Observer Program affiliated with the National Weather Service.

For all its sophistication, Telfeyan’s setup cost about $800 and is on the low end, expensewise, of what’s available, he said.

Some of the others in the Omaha area cost $1,500 or more, he said. These record additional data, such as soil temperature, and will melt snow to determine the moisture content of a given snowfall.

With advances in technology, tracking the weather has never been easier. And as Telfeyan can attest, there’s a wide range of weather-related gifts to purchase for Dad, from quirky to intricate, from cheap to budget-busting.

“Anybody who is really interested in what the weather is doing loves to see if it got above 90 degrees or below zero, or if there were 3 inches of rain or 16 inches of snow,” Telfeyan said. “It just gets in your blood.”

Telfeyan, 60, is the civilian chief of requirements management at Offutt’s Air Force Weather Agency.

The one weather device that every home should have, emergency managers say, is a

weather radio.

Paul Johnson, director of the Douglas County Emergency Management Agency, said weather radios, which are programmed to receive National Weather Service forecasts and warnings, are as essential to a family’s safety as a fire alarm.

“We’re in a tornado-prone area as the events of last year have proven,” Johnson said.

In 2008, tornadoes struck west Omaha and the Little Sioux Scout Ranch in western Iowa, with the latter claiming the lives of four Boy Scouts.

“The value of a weather radio is paramount, and they’re relatively inexpensive,” Johnson said.

Bob Batt, vice president at Nebraska Furniture Mart, said his home is well-stocked with weather radios, including one that can be operated by hand-cranking it.

“I think it’s one of the cheapest investments you can make for your family’s safety,” he said. “Father’s Day is a good excuse to buy one — so is Mother’s Day.”

Contact the writer:

444-1102, nancy.gaarder@owh.com