Not every website sells something or promotes a service. Some are just about sharing something genuinely useful with the people around you. That’s exactly what Lewis Weather is: a personal weather station built and maintained by the Lewis family in the Cowesett neighborhood of Warwick, Rhode Island.
lewisweather.com is live, free to visit, and updates every minute with real weather conditions measured right here in Warwick.
What is a personal weather station?
A personal weather station is a sensor you mount at your home that measures local weather conditions: temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, rainfall, barometric pressure, UV index, solar radiation, and even lightning strikes. Unlike readings from an airport or a regional weather service, a home station gives you hyperlocal data: conditions at that specific location, not an average across a wide area.
The Lewis family uses a Tempest WeatherFlow all-in-one sensor, a research-grade device that connects to the WeatherFlow network and streams readings in real time. The data updates every minute as long as the station is running.
What can you see on the site?
Visit lewisweather.com and you’ll see the current conditions at the Cowesett station pulled live from the sensor:
- Current temperature and feels-like temperature
- Wind speed and direction, with a live compass rose
- Humidity, dew point, and barometric pressure with trend
- UV index and solar radiation
- Rainfall totals for today, the last hour, and yesterday
- Lightning strike count and distance for the last three hours
- Device battery status
- A 10-day forecast with hourly detail
- A live NOAA/NWS radar map centered on Rhode Island
The whole page refreshes automatically every minute. If you open it on your phone, you can add it to your home screen and it behaves like a native app: no app store required. That kind of installable web page is called a Progressive Web App, or PWA.
How does the data get from the sensor to the website?
The Tempest sensor talks to a small hub inside the house over radio. The hub connects to WeatherFlow’s network over WiFi and sends readings to their servers. The website then calls WeatherFlow’s API: essentially asking for the latest data and displaying it on the page. The whole round trip takes less than a second.
Because the data call is made through a server-side PHP script rather than directly from the browser, the website avoids cross-origin security restrictions that would otherwise block the request. It’s a small technical detail, but one that matters when you’re building something that has to work reliably for everyone who visits.
The live radar map
The bottom of the page has a live radar map powered by official NOAA/National Weather Service data. The radar tiles come from Iowa State University’s Mesonet, which distributes NWS NEXRAD data as a free map layer. The map is interactive: you can pan and zoom, and it loads right inside the page without any third-party iframe.
Comp-u-Doc’s role
Lewis Weather is hosted by Comp-u-Doc. We handle the web hosting so the site stays online and loads quickly for visitors in Rhode Island and beyond. The site uses Apache on a shared hosting environment with HTTPS, security headers, and caching rules configured to keep it fast and secure.
If you have a project like this: a personal site, a small business website, or a community resource, we can host it for you and help make sure the technical side is done right. Give us a call at (401) 884-4432 or visit our web design page to learn more.
Check it out
Whether you live nearby or just want to see what the weather is doing in Warwick, Rhode Island, Lewis Weather is worth a bookmark. It’s a good example of what a small personal website can do when it’s built with care: accurate data, a clean design, and no ads.