The stocking is where gift giving gets difficult, because the budget is small and the temptation is to fill it with novelty. Novelty is exactly wrong for this person. A weather obsessive with a cartoon cloud keyring feels mildly patronised. The same person with a $12 pocket anemometer will use it at a beach in April and tell you about it.

Here are fourteen things under $20 that are small, real, and not embarrassing.

The genuinely useful ones

1. A pocket anemometer, around $15. A handheld wind meter that actually works. This is the best non print item on the list. It is the sort of thing enthusiasts want and never get round to buying, and it turns any walk into a measurement.

2. A decent hygrometer, $10 to $20. Measures humidity properly rather than approximately. Appeals strongly to the instrument end of the hobby.

3. A radar app subscription, around $10 a year. The base paid tier of a serious radar app is the thing enthusiasts most want and least buy for themselves. Print the confirmation, put it in an envelope, and put an actual object in the stocking alongside so there is something to unwrap.

4. A proper compass, $10 to $20. For anyone who watches sky and wants to be right about which way a storm is moving.

5. A red light head torch, $10. Night observing without ruining dark adaptation. Also useful for everything else in life, which is how you know it is a good gift.

6. A notebook that works in the rain, around $15. Spotters write in bad conditions and ordinary paper turns to pulp. Waterproof field notebooks cost about fifteen dollars, last for years, and are the sort of thing someone uses constantly without ever having thought to buy one.

The reading ones

7. A secondhand copy of a classic weather book, $3 to $10. Older meteorology books are cheap, plentiful and frequently better written than current ones. Look for histories rather than reference works.

8. A pocket cloud spotter's guide, around $10. Small format, genuinely charming, and the kind of thing an adult enthusiast is slightly pleased to be given permission to own.

9. A USGS topo map of somewhere they watch weather, around $15. Unexpected, and pairs with the compass.

The wearable and drinkable ones

10. Good coffee, $10 to $15. For a category of person containing a disproportionate number of shift workers and 3am alarm setters, this is never wrong.

11. Thermal socks, $12. Standing in a field at dawn in March is a core activity of this hobby and most people do it in bad socks.

12. A microfibre lens cloth, two pack, $6. Anyone who photographs storms is constantly wiping rain off glass with a sleeve.

The ones with a bit of thought in them

13. A printed weather record from the day they were born. Free to find, a few dollars to print. Historical observation archives are public. Roll it, tie it, done.

14. A packet of seeds for a wind hardy garden plant. Silly, cheap, and lands better than it has any right to for the kind of person who has opinions about wind.

If you can stretch past $20

Two steps up are worth making, and both break the budget by less than it feels.

The Halloween tornado mug, $24.99. A jack-o-lantern scarecrow being carried off by a funnel. Five dollars over, and the cheapest thing in the shop.

The hook echo mug, $30.99. The radar signature a supercell makes just before producing a tornado, on an 11oz ceramic mug. Eleven dollars over, and it gets used every morning for years, which is a better ratio than anything on this list.

What to leave out

  • Novelty weather keyrings, cartoon cloud anything, weather rocks. The joke has been made, repeatedly, by relatives, since childhood.
  • A tornado in a bottle. They already had one. They were nine.
  • Cheap plastic thermometers. They have a good one. Giving them a bad one is worse than giving them nothing.

The short answer

Buy the pocket anemometer. It is about $15, it works, it is small, and it is the one thing on this list that will actually leave the house.

Nothing in the shop itself comes in under $20. If the budget can stretch, the mugs start at $24.99 and the archival prints at $34.99 in the shop, printed to order.