My friend Dan Richman has an excellent review of the Weems & Plath 4002 electronic barometer over at Three Sheets Northwest. Here’s an excerpt:
Watching the change in barometric pressure is a time-honored way to predict the weather.
Yet barometers don’t make that easy to do. Barographs, which chart those changes, are obviously far more useful. But traditionally they have been large, delicate mechanical devices unsuitable for anything except ships.
The Weems & Plath Electronic Barometer 4002 is a digital barometer with an LCD current-pressure display and a separate LCD barograph display. Retailing for $170 to $205, it’s an excellent weather instrument, ideal for home use and for consultation before a day sail. Yet it has numerous design shortcomings, and I’m not sure it’s weatherproof enough to be used on board. I do not recommend it as a timepiece, moon phase indicator, yacht-race timer or anything else it purports to be.
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The graphical resolution isn’t nearly as good, but the Kestrel 4000 is very resistant to harsh conditions and collects data at any specified interval. I love mine (and it’s small enough to be always with me in my gadget pack).
http://www.kestrelmeters.com/Kestrel-4000-Weather-Meter.pro
I recently did a lot of research on Barographs since pressure changes are such excellent predictors of upcoming weather. I looked at the Weems & Plath but found it a bit flimsy in nature, and it’s trying to do too much. I ended up with the NASA Clipper Meteoman. It has some of the shortfalls of the Weems & Plath, but it has a dedicated widescreen display that shows a graph of actual pressure, a timescale that goes back up to 120 hours (5 days) and that’s accessible with just one push of a button, another page that shows the trending of the rate of change, etc. The biggest missing feature is an alarm to notify you of a rapid change, a great predictor of high winds or really nasty weather. The unit’s build quality is excellent, and its price is good (it cost me significantly less to order it from the United Kingdom, with shipping, than from the US based NASA distributor). Anyway – just another option. I have no relation to the product or to this site, but here’s a link to some info… http://www.yachtbits.com/nasa/clipper_meteoman_barometer_systems.php.