The weather barometer didn’t really have a long life span as the inventors of that time quickly figured out that it wasn’t a very precise tool but it was still a pretty good start. If you really are interested in learning more about the water barometer I suggest visiting Wikipedia and searching there. Although we’ve pretty much got it covered in this article if you’re really keen on learning more about the water barometer and who invented it I suggest reading our article about the Goethe barometer – and if that doesn’t satisfy your curiosity you can always go to Wikipedia.

As a short summary the water based barometer was a simple tool used to forecast the weather in the past and has been for many years considered deprecated and unreliable for usage on a large scale, but it still makes up for a do-it-yourself project. If you’re interested in learning how to build a water barometer I suggest giving this article a read: How to build a water barometer. Follow the exact steps from that article and you should have your own water barometer in no time.

water barometer

The only materials you’ll need to build a weather glass barometer are: a clear glass jar (about 18 ounces), a clear straight-neck bottle (about 12 ounces), food colorant (whatever color you like, doesn’t really matter), a rubber band.

STEP 1:

Get a bottle with a straight-neck and a jar that is tall enough for the bottle to sit in upside down without having the neck touch the jar’s bottom. Also, the bottle must not fit so tightly as to form an air-tight seal – so take that into consideration when picking out the bottle and jar. Remove all labels, clean the bottle and jar, and flip the bottle upside down into the jar.

STEP 2:

Fill the jar with enough water to come up just over the mouth of the bottle by an inch or a little more. Add a few drops of food coloring – useful only for visual glamour. Tip the bottle and jar enough to let a little air escape from the bottle so that the liquid is now up in the neck of the bottle and level with the water in the jar.

STEP 3:

Slide the rubber band onto the outside of the jar and position it at the same level as the water. Set the barometer in a spot out of direct sunlight, where it can be observed but won’t get knocked over – an ideal place would be to hang it to a wall near the window but not into direct sunglight. As the water rises and falls in the neck of the bottle, use the rubber band to mark the new level.

And that’s about it – that’s how a weather glass barometer is built. I hope you’ve liked my short tutorial on how to build a weather glass barometer and understood how it works. If you still don’t understand how it works you should check out our other articles related to barometers – especially the ones on how a barometer works.

The Fortin Barometer is mostly used for meteorological measurements whenever high accuracy and reliability are required. The Fortin barometer has been particularly designed for usage in meteorological land stations. Barometers are to be hung or mounted vertical, preferably on a solid wall, and require adequate exposure and accurate management.

Out of all the possible liquid based barometers the Fortin barometer is the most popular one offering great accuracy and reliability under the harshest weather conditions. The Fortin barometer is made out of a glass tube in which a tube of mercury is suspended making the cleaning process a bit more tricky. First you will need to place the Fortin barometer on a foam pad, cloth or cushion. The barometer’s delicate glass casing is fragile and may crack if it falls over during the cleaning process so special attention is required. Place the Fortin barometer in an upright position to keep the mercury from shifting from side to side. Lean the barometer against a steady surface, such as a wall and then wipe the barometer with a dry cloth to remove most loose surface dust and debris, use light pressure to avoid scratching the barometer’s glass casing with any bits of dust that are caught in the cloth. Finally you will need to wet a second piece of cloth until it’s damp to the touch. Spray the barometer with some glass cleaner, afterwards wipe it with the damp cloth and allow it to dry thoroughly before placing it back where it belongs.

fortin barometer

So when you read a barometer the needle will gradually rise up the scale from day to day. In most cases, a high pressure cell means calm, clear, sunny weather, and as the needle moves up the scale, the increase in pressure is suggesting fine, or “fair” weather is on the way. Similarly, as the high passes over the daily change in the needle’s position will show a decrease in the air pressure, and suggests that if this continues you will experience a period of low pressure. Of course, as in most things to do with weather and life, it’s not quite that simple to read a barometer, which means that although the pressure changes recorded by your barometer have some predictive value, they won’t always be right. For example, if the center of a high passes at a certain distance from where you’re located, you may not experience the fair weather that your barometer predicted before the pressure, and the needle begins to fall. Another general rule of thumb in “how to read a barometer” is that very high pressure readings may indicate windy conditions to follow. The reasoning behind this is that an extreme reading usually means a high pressure gradient to the next low, and high pressure gradients mean strong winds. This rule doesn’t apply in quite the same way to very low pressures. While the pressure gradient will certainly be high, the low is actually the focus of the winds, and unless you happen to be under the eye of a hurricane, the strong winds have already arrived. But you can, if you know how to read a barometer ,turn it into a very useful forecasting tool, but you will need to keep records of the weather to do so. Apart from pressure changes, you can record wind direction, wind direction changes, cloud cover and type of clouds, and the occurrences of rain, snow or thunderstorms.

So let’s recap on what you need to know about how to read a barometer:

Get a regular mercury barometer and start measuring the atmospheric pressure around you by simply measuring how high the mercury column goes up or down. The way you’re going to measure it is from bottom to top using a simpler ruler, keeping in mind that under regular atmospheric pressure the vacuum at the top of the barometer is at almost 30 inches (29.92 to be more precise). When the mercury column drops below that point, we’re experiencing a drop in atmospheric pressure and that means we’re going to get bad weather. This thing works viceversa as well so if the mercury column rises you can expect nicer weather. All in all learning how to read a barometer is a good thing if you’re an outdoor enthusiast and want to know how to plan your trips.