Forecasting Technique Earns $25K

Matthew Haugland is $25,000 richer today after winning The Collegiate Inventors Competition for his microscale weather forecasting technique to predict overnight temperatures. Besides presumably eventually bringing more accurate temperature forecasts to the general public, the article on their site says that the "Uncoupled surface layer model" should help farmers protect crops and will have implications on the forecasting of overnight fog, which causes the most transportation deaths each year.

ANEMOMETER + STACK OF MONEY:
DESPERATE FOR CLIP-ART

I respect this guy as a true hard-core weather geek: Trying to turn his yard into a desert with cacti when he was a kid... purchasing land to set up a mesonet (dense network of weather observations) which eventually led to this method. He's the type of guy who would have an internet-enabled graph of the temperature in his office.