What is a Storm Glass?

My Mom and Dad live on the East Coast of Canada, in a small town on Cape Breton Island.  The area is a storm magnet with blustery winter snow storms, and hold on to your hat hurricanes.  My parents purchased a contraption called a "Storm Glass".  We got the question "What is a Storm Glass?" about 10 times since Christmas so I thought I would write a blog post explaining what it is.

A "Storm Glass" is technically a "Weather based Barometer", a tool that measures atmospheric pressure.  It works based on the barometric air pressure, and predicts when a storm is a brewin'.  The glass is filled half way up with a colored water.  When the air pressure is low, the water will rise up the spout of the glass, while higher air pressure drop the water down the spout.

According to Wikipedia:

Water-based barometersEdit

The weather ball barometer consists of a glass container with a sealed body, half filled with water. A narrow spout connects to the body below the water level and rises above the water level. The narrow spout is open to the atmosphere. When the air pressure is lower than it was at the time the body was sealed, the water level in the spout will rise above the water level in the body; when the air pressure is higher, the water level in the spout will drop below the water level in the body. A variation of this type of barometer can be easily made at home.^[11]

The concept that decreasing atmospheric pressure predicts stormy weather, postulated by Lucien Vidi, provides the theoretical basis for a weather prediction device called a "weather glass" or a "Goethe barometer" (named for Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the renowned German writer and polymath who developed a simple but effective weather ball barometer using the principles developed by Torricelli). The French name, le baromètre Liègeois, is used by some English speakers.^[9] This name reflects the origins of many early weather glasses - the glass blowers of Liège, Belgium.^[9][10]

My parents bought all of the kids a Storm Glass for Christmas.  I set mine up, following the instructions, using green liquid.  Over the past couple of weeks I have noticed the water going up and down the spout quite often.  I live in a small town outside of Kamloops, BC, smack dab in the middle of a bunch of mountains (not the huge type like in the Rockies), with a huge lake close by and a large river running about 200 feet from our house.  We often get bizarre weather, like today when the weather prediction was for balmy plus 6 and wind of 15 km/hr.  We ended up with a beautiful temperature, and frightening wind in the 80 km/hr range.  I'm not sure why they can not predict the wind properly here, but you often need to add 50 km/hr to the prediction.  When I woke up this morning, my Storm Glass water had risen so high that it was dripping out of the spout.  The picture at the top of this blog post is from this morning.

New Years Eve we had some friends over for the night and it was supposed to snow according to the weather network.  Sure enough the Storm Glass in the morning was low in the spout, and by the afternoon it was creeping up the spout.  By the time late afternoon had come, the snow had started and the spout had creeped to the top of the spout..

There are many different styles of Storm Glass out there, with the popular one in my family being one similar to this one from Amazon.com.  It's quite inexpensive, but it really does work!  If you are going to purchase one, make sure you have some food coloring at home to add in to the water.

Jen 

xoxo