A local eye on the weather

As you know, I try and find decent weather reports from a variety of sources so that we know what to expect for the week to come.

Weather forecasting though is notoriously unpredictable and even the so called professionals often get it wrong. Add to that the fact that local weather can be very different a few kilometres away and it makes the whole process a bit hit an miss.

Things should improve though now because this morning I read about a young man in Orihuela who has set up a professional weather station on the roof of his building.

Twenty year old, Pedro José Gómez wanted to be a meteorologist from the age of 3. His father encouraged him by teaching his son how to read the sky. At the age of nine young Pedro was taking readings of maximum and minimum temperatures each day - recording them in a notebook. Now, of course that work is done for him by a computer program which records temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, air pressure and rainfall.

All this information was relayed firstly via his blog and then via a website and his Facebook page for people to read. As a measure of his success, his website had 54,000 visits in January alone and he has 600 followers on Facebook. Not surprisingly, Pedro has won several awards for all this work both at national and at European levels.

You can Google the name "MeteOrihuela" and find out for yourselves just what the weather has in store for today. Follow the link to his Facebook profile which will then take you to his website.