If you’re like me, you occasionally find yourself stranded in the rain without an umbrella, having forgotten to check the Weather Channel online before leaving the house in the morning. No matter how amazingly designed your umbrella is, it’s useless unless you have it around when it starts raining, and buying a dinky little substitute umbrella off the street just to make it home without getting soaked is frustrating and costly.

The Ambient Umbrella’s handle lights up when there is snow or rain in the forecast, unobtrusively but firmly reminding you that you should probably bring it along when you leave the house. Thunderstorms, drizzles, snow, and generic rain all have their own distinctive light patterns, which is pretty cool - some people don’t feel like an umbrella is necessary in the snow, for example - and data is wirelessly transferred from an online weather station to a chip in the umbrella’s handle, so you don’t have to do any downloading or updating yourself. It’s only available for the United States at the moment, but hopefully it will spread elsewhere fast - I would have loved to have something like this when I visited England last summer and it rained almost every day!

[via Geeky Gadgets]