The Power of 5 team got an email from Caleb Leonard, a 15-year-old student at the Biomed Science Academy in Rootstown, who has built and is improving on a unique smart weather station. That got Allan's attention, and he visited Caleb's project in Aurora to learn more about just how impressive his setup is.
Caleb's 'a-ha' moment was on Aug. 6, 2024, during a tornado outbreak across Northeast Ohio. He was tracking severe weather developing in Western Ohio, with one storm that formed an EF-1 tornado in Medina County. His dad, Michael, got a notification that his workplace in Independence was under a Tornado Warning. Caleb realized that the storm's trajectory would bring it right into Aurora if it held together.
Michael said, "...that was, I think, the first time that all of a sudden his science brain really kicked in and realized, oh, this is a thing I can track."
Caleb, when asked about the same day, nearly said the same thing about what he learned from that event: "I'm finally getting a chance to figure all this out, and I'm like, now watch, it's gonna weaken or something right before it hits our house, and it didn't happen."
While the EF-1 tornado did cross I-271 and was on approach to Aurora, triggering tornado sirens in nearby Twinsburg, the tornado did dissipate. No damage was reported in Aurora. That experience, however, inspired Caleb to start a massive project, creating a reliable smart weather station, to help him track and learn more about the weather conditions, right at home.
As of April 2026, the weather station is on "version 3.5", between 3 and 4, as he's actively working on improving parts and functionality. Caleb told Allan, "The first one [version] that was just a phone sitting out in the rain..." Then he took it apart (multiple times), and said, "...now that I knew all the sensors and stuff could work, then I built this."
This required lots of experimenting and lots of learning, which required some help. Luckily for Caleb, he has a great support system, with both his dad and grandparents being engineers. For the questions they couldn't answer, AI was a huge help to Caleb, particularly in figuring out proper wiring and parts. Caleb's dad, Mike, says that AI has been a big help as, "...he's able to do that in a much faster process -- than he could with just Google, like our generation -- could."
Since engineering runs in the family DNA, as mentioned above, it's no wonder that Caleb's passion for science started early. In fact, Mike said, "We remember him as like a 6-month-old lying on the ground watching the unevenly shaped circles spinning, and it wasn't a matter of, oh, this fell, I need to pick it up. It was. Oh, this fell. Why is it spinning and laying down on the ground and watching it spin, trying to understand how things work."
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