The amateur meteorological record is more useful than people expect — until they try to reconstruct it. The late frost that hit the vegetable garden in April three years ago: was it the 14th or the 17th? The fog event that lasted four days straight in November: what year was that? Memory collapses these events into impressions rather than dates, which makes them useless for planning anything.
A daily weather log is the simplest act of environmental data collection. The value accumulates slowly and arrives suddenly when you actually need it.
The Condition Fields and Why Checklists Work Here
The template uses individual boolean fields for each condition: Sun, Cloudy, Overcast, Fog, Rain, Drizzle, Breezy, Windy, Humid, Snow. Each is a separate on/off toggle rather than a single multi-select field.
That structure is deliberate. Weather on any given day is frequently a compound event — overcast in the morning, sun in the afternoon, drizzle by evening. A single "Conditions" choice field forces you to pick the dominant state and loses the rest. With individual boolean fields, you toggle what's true for the day without losing the complexity. A day that was cloudy, humid, with afternoon drizzle gets three toggles, and all three are queryable.
The Conditions text field above the individual booleans is for the narrative override — the summary phrase you might want to write before checking boxes, or the edge case that doesn't fit any toggle.
Breezy and Windy are similarly separated rather than combined into a wind speed field. For a personal observer without an anemometer, the distinction between breezy (leaves moving, flags extending) and windy (branches moving, difficult to walk into) is a felt observation, not a measured one. Two boolean fields match the granularity of the instrument.
Temperature as the Anchor Data
Temp-hi and Low are the two numbers that turn a qualitative log into a quantitative one. Without temperature data, the log is a sequence of weather descriptions. With it, you can calculate growing degree days, identify frost events by date, compare summer highs across years, and answer the garden question: "When does it typically drop below 4°C in autumn?"
DOW (day of week) alongside Date sounds redundant — Memento can derive day of week from a date field. But for scanning a log quickly in list view, seeing Saturday / March 14 / Sunny / Hi: 22 / Low: 8 reads faster than March 14 alone.
The Photo Field as Context Anchor
Foto attaches a sky photograph to the day's record. For a hobbyist meteorologist or a gardener tracking phenological events, a daily sky photo taken at a consistent time (solar noon, or first light) creates a visual time-lapse archive when browsed in sequence.
Over three years of daily photos, the date on which the oak behind the house first shows leaf bud is recoverable. The day the pond was still frozen is documented. The evening sky before an unusual pressure event has a reference. The Last update field tracks when the record was most recently edited, which matters when you're filling in two days' worth of observations at once.
The Notes field is where the log stops being data and starts being observation: "Strong petrichor before the rain" or "First swallows of spring" or "Frost damage visible on the tomato seedlings this morning."