Thanks for the link! As I said, it's rather complicated and it's prone to lots of human erer! Plus, this method is completely manual, absolutely no kind of "automation".
Of course, the human error part is mitigated with important tips like: "Before it snows, put your snow measuring board outside." It's probably very frustrating to also forget where that board is! "Oops! Can I still measure the snow on the board with my size 13 foot print?"
Personally, I prefer our local method of simply firing any weather person who allows:
- more than two inches for one event
- more than 2 days of ground coverage
I'm sure most of those who enjoy snow and weather data collection don't mind doing the work required to do the measuring. For folks who only get problems from occasional snow, I doubt many will do this for free.
As I understand the process described, you are not really asking for an automatic/mechanical/electronic device as much as a place to enter the data in WC. Of course, WC would need to make use of the data. That is a somewhat easier task, after all, "programming is simply typing"!