Funmurphys: the Blog

Necessity

Congratulations to Matthew Haugland, winner of the 2006 Collegiate Inventors Competition for inventing a better way to forecast nighttime temperatures:

When Matt Haugland was a child in San Jose, California, he remembers that his parents gave him a small thermometer that he used to measure the temperature in different spots around his yard. Although the yard wasn’t large, Haugland was fascinated by the temperature differences in the different parts of his yard. As he grew older, he became fascinated by the microclimates of the San Francisco Bay region and the reasons behind them.

Consequently, Haugland hoped to own land for the purpose of researching the microclimates on it. In 1999, he transferred from school in San Jose to the University of Oklahoma in search of affordable land. He bought a five-acre plot and installed several weather stations across it. Through his research, based on weather observations from these stations, Haugland developed a weather forecasting technique that accurately predicts nighttime temperatures.

As Haugland says, “I’m hoping that this model will help improve weather forecasts around the world.” The implications of his work are broad, from helping farmers protect their crops from frost and freezing, to helping predict nighttime fog formation, the biggest weather-related cause of death in transportation.

You should also check out the Inventor's Hall of Fame while you're at it.