"MILTON, Mass. — Perched in a tower atop a hill, Matthew Douglas climbs a staircase and emerges from a hatch on the roof, where a heavy glass ball in a metal cradle has burned a thin streak into a strip of paper, recording the previous day’s sunlight.
It’s part of a routine he and other weather observers at Blue Hill Observatory and Science Center, a weather station 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Boston, have followed every day for the last 141 years. Using largely unchanged analog tools, they have built a continuous record of temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind and other measurements that can feed weather forecasts and scientific research.
“My routine is the same every day,” said chief weather observer Douglas, who has worked there since 1997, sporting a dark blue sweatshirt with the name of the observatory on the front. “The only thing that changes are the numbers and the weather itself.”
Blue Hill is the nation’s oldest continually operating weather observatory, according to executive director Alex Evans. Since 1885, staff and volunteers have relied on many of the same instruments, including mercury and alcohol thermometers, hygrometers that use human hair to measure moisture in the air, and that glass sphere on the roof tracking the hours of bright sunshine."
