Head in the clouds

I've noticed that some personal weather station sites, especially those that use Weather Display, display the height of the cloud base. I've often wondered how they got that figure.

Assuming that there was some sort of calculation that could be done I did a search on Google and came up with this and this. Both sites give pretty much the same method of calculation.

So, more for fun than anything else, I've added the value you get to various parts of my website. The tricky part is finding out a way of checking if it's anything close to correct (for Cumulus clouds, obviously). I doubt I'll be able to do that any time soon (doubtless there are some neat gadgets you can buy that'll let you do it).

Of course, I made the silly mistake of telling a certain Scottish-based geek about this and he just had to add it to his weather station site too (actually getting it in before me). But that's okay, I'm letting him off this time because he was kind enough to let me illustrate this blog entry with the image you see above.

File Under: Personal Weather Station, WS3600, Calculate Cloud Base, Cumulus.