Kentucky Mesonet Adding
More Stations to Network
by Tommy Newton
With spring upon us and summer not far off, new Kentucky Mesonet stations will be popping up across the state. The network has six sites operational and has eight more ready for installation as weather permits, said Dr. Stuart Foster, director of the Mesonet and the Kentucky Climate Center at Western Kentucky University. “A very wet late winter and early spring has restricted our field operations,” he said.
The Mesonet recently signed site license agreements for three new sites – at Adair County’s Green River Commerce Park in Columbia, on property owned by the Hopkinsville Solid Waste Authority in Christian County and at Hubble Park near Stanford in Lincoln. Other sites ready for installation are located in Bullitt, Carroll, Fayette, Grayson and LaRue counties. Sites in Calloway, Casey, Logan, Ohio, Rowan and Warren counties are providing weather and climate data.
Mesonet officials continue to identify, select and negotiate agreements for sites in other areas statewide.
“We’ve broadened our scope to identify sites,” Foster said. “We’ve almost exclusively been looking at public lands up to this point, but we’ve recently expanded to locate sites on private land as we move into more agricultural regions of Kentucky where soil monitoring is expected to be more critical.
“Having sites in areas that are actively farmed will be beneficial as we try to serve agricultural interests.”
The Mesonet’s goal is to develop a statewide automated environmental monitoring network of approximately 100 stations to collect real-time weather and climate observations. Initial funding for the project was secured by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell through a $1.5 million federal earmark for the Kentucky Climate Center, part of WKU’s Applied Research and Technology Program in the Ogden College of Science and Engineering.
The Mesonet’s new website, which was launched in January, has experienced increased traffic especially during severe weather outbreaks, according to Mike Grogan, systems administrator.
“We generally see more interest in the website as users follow active weather systems from west to east across Kentucky,” Grogan said.
Visitors to www.kymesonet.org access data directly on a map that features temperature, precipitation, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction from Mesonet reporting stations. The site also includes a daily weather summary from the stations along with other information on the Mesonet project.
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