another interesting thing to watch for on the skew-T is when the green line and red line come together. The green line is dew point, while the red is temperature. When the two meet, that is your current cloud ceiling (so you can predict if you will break out of a cloud deck and have a nice cloud sea if you push on).
I would make use of the weather balloon soundings. Below is the skew-T plot of the sounding data from Salem, Oregon at 0400 this morning. On the far right are wind bars which tell you direction and magnitude according to pressure change (altitude). consider 700 mb to be about 10,000 ft and work from there.
they probably write the teleprompter stuff for the weather guy...I could see it now: "wow not a lot of rain to measure in tacoma these days, and speaking of small things in tacoma this erik dude last night.."