Due to popular demand, Kestrel, a company that’s been delivering portable weather instruments for years, has finally come out with a portable weather measuring gadget that can measure both the wind speed and direction using a built in digital compass, along with some other cool and somewhat geeky features.

The Kestrel 4500 weather meter fits into a 2″ x 6″ pouch, weighs less than 8 ounces and records 20 different types of measurements while storing up to 2000 of them which can then be downloaded to a computer and charted. Measurements can be recorded manually or automatically, and can even be set to automatically record when the device is powered off.

Among the many weather measurements that the Kestrel 4500 can record, graph and trend, some of the more notable are crosswind and headwind/tailwind based on a user-defined target, maximum and average wind speeds, wind chill, altitude (barometric pressure) and heat stress index.

The Kestrel 4500 Pocket Weather Tracker is also waterproof, floats (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished something was water proof and floated) and runs on 2 AAA batteries delivering around 400 hours of use. The 4500 also has a number of accessories available for downloading information, calibrating and setting it up for continuous measurements.

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