Visit To Boys' Home

It's always a lot of fun to take road trips. In fact, it's one of my favorite parts of the job.

Today, I had the opportunity to talk weather with some smart young men at Boys' Home in Covington.

In the photo (right) you can see us making a "cloud in a bottle" using ordinary pop bottle and pump. This is a visual experiment that explains the water cycle, cloud formation...and builds muscles. :) as you pressurize the bottle.

The students asked many great questions about weather balloons, global warming and how animals can predict the weather (one of my favorite topics).

The Boys' Home is actually one of our newest WeatherBug partners. Through grants, they have purchased a live weather station and motion camera to track weather conditions from outside the Covington city limits.

That's the best part about WeatherBug is that we're able to see what's happening in neighborhoods across the region. Other media outlets can only show you what's happening at the airports using the National Weather Service stations (the closest one to Covington is in Hot Springs, many miles away), which data is updated once an hour.

WeatherBug weather stations send data our to our computer every second, allowing us to get real-time temperature, wind and rainfall data instantly. Not to mention you can get the data on your computer as well by clicking on your closest WeatherBug station.

If you'd like even more information about WeatherBug or would like to purchase one for your school, business or perhaps even your home, click here.

--Meteorologist Brent Watts