ORANGE BEACH, AL. — Since studying meteorology in college, Sean Brumley has wanted to put up and manage a weather station.

Now the GIS Specialist for the City of Orange Beach has one with the monitoring station sitting on his desk at work.

“I’ve been wanting to put this to work for a while,” Brumley said. “The city agreed to do it and it’s basically going to be our weather data. It’ll keep our weather history and everything.”

If you want to know what’s going on weather wise in Orange Beach at any given moment, the information is available on the Internet.

“Weather underground, they do any weather station,” he said. “We put ours on Weather Underground and when you type in Orange Beach zip code, you’ll see it says weather station and ours is Community Development, Orange Beach.

“It’ll have live data right there.”

Before the station became operational about two weeks ago, Brumley said weather information about Orange Beach came from stations outside the city.

“For example, that tropical storm we had come through here, we can see how much rain we had in the City of Orange Beach,” he said. “Instead of using a weather station out of Mobile or wherever, we’ll know exactly how much rain we got. If we have a hurricane or something like that, we’ll know the top wind speed for the City of Orange Beach.”

Provided the station can weather the storm. The apparatus is anchored firmly on city property and the wind gauge can measure winds up to 155 mph.

“Technically, it can go over 155 mph winds, but the tripod that it’s on, I don’t know if that can withstand up to 155 mph wind,” Brumley said. “But at least we’ll know the last recorded data. You’re always going to have some kind of debris hitting it.”

A little routine maintenance is required, but the station mainly runs itself, including getting power from solar panels.

“You just have to make sure nothing’s getting inside the rain gauge and keep a check on that,” Brumley said. “Other than that it runs on itself. It’s all wireless, it’s all solar power. It has a little battery in there and a solar panel recharges it every day so it can run at night. It’s all wireless to a receiver in my office. That receiver connects to the internet and it has its own web page through weatherlinks.com.”

As a meteorology minor in college, it has always been a dream of Brumley’s to set up a weather station. The cost is relatively minimal, about $1,000. The biggest chunk of that goes for the software to put the information gathered online.

“It has to be within a 1,000 feet of the receiver,” Brumley said. “It has to be at least 15 feet away from trees or 100 feet if it’s a large pine tree. It can’t be in the shade. Nothing can be blocking the rain gauge. It has to be at least seven feet tall.”

And the wind gauge monitor has to be facing “true south” so the direction of the wind is correctly conveyed to the Internet.

“We put it on our city’s website,” he said. “You can see the live temperature, the humidity, wind speed, wind direction. Anything you need. Especially if you want to know if it’s raining or not. “

Brumley is now hoping for a rain to see how his old lawn rain gauge compares to the high-tech version.

“I used to have a plastic rain gauge out here and now I’m ready for it to rain again so I can see the how accurate one is to the other,” he said.