We've observed a dramatic increase in the sophistication of home weather stations since we started reviewing them five years ago. Smart home connectivity is all but standard now, and instrumentation and sensors are significantly more accurate. This is why I was excited to see Ambient Weather's WS-5000 on my doorstep. Part of my excitement is from what has happened at Ambient Weather itself since I reviewed their last station, the WS-2902, back in 2018. Neilsen-Kellerman acquired the company in 2019, and the WS-5000 is the first station produced under the new ownership.

Smart home enthusiasts take note: You can tie Ambient Weather's WS-2902 Osprey weather station into your smart home system, so your indoor lights won't wait until sunset to turn on when it's gray and dreary outside; your smart sprinkler will stop watering the lawn if it starts to rain; and you can ask Alexa or Google Assistant for a weather report from where you actually live, not from the closest National Weather Service (NWS) monitoring station. You'd think most home weather stations do these things, but they don't. Netatmo comes close, with hooks into Samsung SmartThings and IFTTT, but you'll spend more than $300 to build out a complete Netatmo system that can measure temperature, rainfall, and wind speed. The WS-2902 Osprey is built with connectivity top of mind. It's Wi-Fi capable and it works with IFTTT, so you can program weather events and conditions to trigger actions in your smart home.