Sometime I'd like to hear more about your weather station rig. It sounds like interesting nerdery to engage in, and I've thought about getting into it myself.
There's varying levels of nerdery, depending on how inclined you are with electronics/software and how deep your pockets are.
On the "hands dirty" front, there are dozens of sensor kits out for the Raspberry Pi, intended to teach people how things like the I2C bus works. Great for home-schooling kids and STEM classes in primary schools, but you wind up with an uncalibrated instrument that can read out to a gazillion meaningless decimal places.
At the consumer level, you can buy something off the shelf for $100-$250. Most of the ones that provide remote access will do it through the manufacturer's web portal, which may allow you to download summaries or send your data to Weather Underground if you're lucky. Acu-Rite just released
this interesting $99 package bundling their end-of-life 5-in-1 sensor with an indoor console that uploads to Weather Underground and has no known way to retrieve/intercept the data and save it locally. The 5-in-1 sensor is decent for the price point (I've had one since 2010), but they only report every 36 seconds which is annoying if you want to track things with higher resolutions like front passages as they happen. (Not recommending this package unless all that you want to do is upload to Weather Underground, especially with the 5-in-1 sensor being EOL and having an uploader embedded in firmware when WU has been changing their site weekly.)
Moving up to the pro-sumer tier, there are a few options in the $400-$1,000 range. The big dog is Davis, and their sensor accuracy is more or less universally accepted. Davis and I have a love-hate relationship going back to the early 1990's, when they made my (non-profit!) employer spend $250 for a photocopied piece of paper and a floppy disk full of useless MS-DOS code that documented their super-secret proprietary serial API to log station data. Their indoor consoles have not been updated since VAG-1551's roamed the Earth, and probably share components.
Getting access to the data from their system requires buying an
over-priced add-on logger from them that makes the consumer package above look cheap. As they used to say about IBM, nobody has ever been fired for buying Davis. You won't see one at my house, unless the mother of all deals pops up on
eBay for a used one.
Above that level, you are into the serious weather instruments market. Think 3D ultrasonic anemometers, fog measuring lasers, and other goodies with government-sized price tags to match. If you want to piece something together that's personalized,
http://www.youngusa.com/. There's also
Gill and others in this market segment. Occasionally a Gill ultrasonic anemometer pops up on
eBay as government surplus from an
airport ASOS upgrade, if you're patient and want to drop $600+ for obsolete hardware.
Before long, you will have a whole slew of sensors around your yard that rivals only Jack's scan tool collection, trying to get them all to agree. Oh, and if anyone has about 30 feet of antenna tower laying around.
I'll explain my setups in a future post.
Personally, I would hold off on a purchase for a few months. Darn NDA won't let me say more.....