Working on the antenna on your roof, fishing on a large lake in a small boat or hanging out on top of your local water tower are all places that you probably don’t want to get caught unexpectedly in a thunderstorm. This thunderstorm detector can pick up lightening from up to 75 miles away by detecting “the low-frequency radio signals, or sferics, emitted by lightning as they travel through the earths ionosphere.”, according to the catalog page at Hammacher Schlemmer.

Not only does it tell you if it detects lightning, but it will tell you how far away a storm front is, whether or not its heading your way and how soon it will get there. The device is small – only 6.5 inches tall and runs up to 90 hours on a 9 volt battery. When storms …

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, …