Bowling Green, Ky. - Officials and leaders in the Pennyrile and Green River Area Development Districts will learn more about the Kentucky Mesonet project during upcoming meetings.

The Mesonet, a statewide automated environmental monitoring network of approximately 100 stations, will collect real-time weather and climate observations and will support a variety of products to serve needs across Kentucky.

Representatives from the Kentucky Climate Center at Western Kentucky University and the National Weather Service office in Paducah will discuss the Mesonet at 10 a.m. June 28 at the Pennyrile Area Development District in Hopkinsville and 1:30 p.m. June 29 at the Green River Area Development District in Owensboro.

“We believe that enlisting community involvement early on will help us to achieve our goal of building the best possible Mesonet to serve the people of Kentucky,” said state climatologist Stuart Foster, director of the Kentucky Climate Center.
The series of meetings around the state began in early June at the Lincoln Trail Area Development District in Elizabethtown.

“The purpose of these meetings is to introduce the Mesonet project to local officials and leaders and to ask for their help and support in identifying possible sites where we might install stations,” Dr. Foster said.

After possible sites have been identified, a team of graduate students trained by the National Weather Service will complete site surveys and submit reports that rate the quality of the sites. Then a regional site selection team will review the surveys and select sites for deploying Mesonet stations.

“We think it is critical to involve people at the local level who know much more about their area and may be able to identify not only good sites but help to maximize the benefits of these stations to their communities,” Dr. Foster said.
Data from the Mesonet will have wide-ranging applications in agriculture, education, emergency management, engineering and construction, water supply management, weather forecasting, and other areas, he said.

Instruments will measure precipitation, temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, soil moisture and soil temperature. Data will be packaged into observations every five minutes and transmitted to the Kentucky Climate Center every 15 minutes, 24 hours per day throughout the year.

The project was funded by a $1.5 million federal earmark secured by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell for the Kentucky Climate Center, part of WKU’s Applied Research and Technology Program in the Ogden College of Science and Engineering.

The General Assembly recognized the project’s value by unanimously approving a resolution recognizing the Kentucky Mesonet as the official source of climatological observations for the state.

The first 15 to 20 stations in the network could be operational by spring 2007, Dr. Foster said.

To learn more about the Kentucky Mesonet, contact the Kentucky Climate Center (http://kyclim.wku.edu/) at (270) 745-5983 or email stuart.foster@wku.edu or rezaul.mahmood@wku.edu.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For information, contact Stuart Foster at (270) 745-5983.

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