Systems Administrator Helping Build Mesonet Technology

June 22, 2007

Bowling Green, Ky. - As the systems administrator for the Kentucky Mesonet, Mike Grogan is working behind the scenes to build the computing and communications infrastructure necessary to support the statewide network.

But Grogan is more than a computer/technology person. He’s also a meteorologist.

“I’m somebody who understands the research and the meaning of atmospheric data and I’m also the person who makes the technology happen,” said Grogan, who graduated from the University of Oklahoma’s meteorology program. “I understand both sides of things.”

Mesonet technicians have installed a data-collection station at the WKU farm and are working to install others around the state. The goal is a statewide automated environmental monitoring network of approximately 100 stations that will collect real-time weather and climate observations and will support a variety of products to serve needs across Kentucky.

“We are building a pretty complicated technology infrastructure,” Grogan said.

“I’m excited about the expertise that Mike brings to the project,” said Dr. Stuart Foster, state climatologist and director of the Kentucky Mesonet. “The scaleable communications solution will allow us to leverage the Mesonet and host data from other monitoring networks which will create opportunities to develop partnerships in both the public and private sectors.”

Before coming to WKU last October, Grogan was a contractor at National Weather Service headquarters and worked with the service’s Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, or AWIPS. He also has worked with companies that provided weather information to broadcast news outlets, emergency management offices, marine interests, and in-flight aircraft.

At each Mesonet site, 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 at WKU every 15 minutes, 24 hours per day, throughout the year.

Quality is the key for data collected and distributed by the Mesonet, Grogan said.

“Quality control is important in the operational sense for forecasters to trust the data, but quality control is important in the research sense also,” he said. “The technology side has to serve the operational needs and the research needs.”

Climate and weather researchers will want to know more than just the raw data; they’ll want to know what equipment was used to collect the data and how it was calibrated, he said.

Grogan also is working with the National Weather Service, one of the Mesonet’s key partners, to provide real-time data to the forecast offices that serve Kentucky. “Since they’ve been a great help to us, I’m trying to get data integrated directly into their workstations,” he said. “That will make the data from WKU more useful to the National Weather Service if we can feed it directly to their forecasters.”

The Mesonet 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.

For more on the Kentucky Mesonet, visit http://kyclim.wku.edu/kymesonet/. For more about Mike Grogan’s background and experience, visit http://www.wku.edu/~michael.grogan
               
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 Mike Grogan at (270) 745-4569.