September 04, 2007
Bowling
Green, Ky. - The Kentucky Mesonet will be adding four more data-collection stations to its network.
The Mesonet recently signed agreements for station sites at Hartford in Ohio County, the Murray State University farm, the new Walnut Hill Elementary School in Casey County, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Bullitt County, according to Dr. Stuart Foster, state climatologist and Mesonet director.
“All of these locations are part of our ongoing effort to build local partnerships around the state for Mesonet stations,” Dr. Foster said, adding that negotiations for additional sites are continuing.
“We’re certainly excited about our agreement with the Casey County Board of Education because we want to take advantage of the opportunity for educational outreach,” he said. “At that site we’ll be able to get elementary school children involved and work with teachers on using the data in the classroom.
“The Bernheim Forest site is outstanding from the perspective of long-term climate monitoring, and we anticipate that it will become an integral part of their educational outreach program. Indeed, each of these four sites will bring added benefits to local communities.”
The Mesonet will be a statewide automated environmental monitoring network that will collect real-time weather and climate observations and will support a variety of products to serve needs across Kentucky, including agriculture, education, emergency management, engineering and construction, water supply management and weather forecasting.
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.
Work on the network’s information technology infrastructure is continuing and Mesonet technicians should begin installing the new stations later this year, he said.
“Our staff is working behind the scenes to build the network infrastructure and ensure the integrity of the data,” he said.
Experimental data from stations in Warren, Logan and Rowan counties is available on the Kentucky Mesonet website at http://www.kymesonet.org/. Click on the “live data” link.
“We encourage people across Kentucky to take a look at the website and see the types of data that will be available through the Mesonet,” Dr. Foster said.
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.
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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