By Paul Mooney
We get our fair share of rain in the North East, so there should be no shortage of study material!

The standard Met Office rain gauge is a copper device which has a 5 inch rim, the edge of which sits 30cm above the ground.

To buy one of these, along with a rainfall measure, would cost in the region of £100, but you can make a simple alternative for your own garden. Although this won't give you officially recognised measurements, it will allow you to keep your own records and compare different weather events and situations.

Basically any container left in the open will collect rainwater. How about using something that would otherwise be thrown away and add to our ever growing mountain of litter?

We've used an empty plastic fizzy pop bottle, 2 litre size. Simply cut the bottle in half and essentially the bottom half is your new rain gauge.

If you leave this standing on your lawn or in your back yard it'll blow all over the place, so you need to make it more stable.

Take a piece of wire, an old coat hanger would do, and carefully bend and twist it to make a holder for your gauge.

Make part of the wire into a hook and secure to the top edge of a fence or shed.

Ideally the rain gauge should be in a place where it is exposed to the elements. It's no good hanging it under the eaves of your house, it'll never collect any rain there.

Use your new rain gauge along with your barometer to record the weather patterns.

For instance, watch for times when the air pressure falls and you end up with a half-full rain gauge, or days when the pressure is rising and you manage to collect no rain at all.

The finished rain gauge

Keep a note of your readings and measurements in a book and also try and note your observations of how the sky looked - was it blue, overcast, and so on.

Observing what's going on around us, weather-wise, in this way is a great way for children in particular to learn, but none of us are ever too old to learn, are we?

Don't get me wrong, your home-made weather station isn't going to instantly unravel the forces of nature that govern our weather, but then neither is buying a £40 million super computer!

In our next instalment how about we try and make a rainfall radar system using a dustbin lid and an empty washing up liquid bottle? No? Ok then, we'll try and make a wind vane! .