March 06, 2009
Bowling
Green, Ky. - The Kentucky Mesonet is expanding its weather and climate monitoring network to Barren County with a station installed on a farm near Merry Oaks.
“We are extremely pleased to have a new station operating in Barren County as part of the Kentucky Mesonet,” said Dr. Stuart Foster, director of the Mesonet and the Kentucky Climate Center at Western Kentucky University. “This site will provide valuable data to assist National Weather Service meteorologists in producing forecasts and severe weather warnings, and will also provide benefits to a wide range of interests in the local area.”
About 20 Mesonet sites are operational statewide collecting real-time weather and climate data on temperature, precipitation, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction. Data is 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.
The data is available online at www.kymesonet.org; the website includes a “Live Graphs” feature that allows users to visualize weather/climate data collected in a 24-hour period.
The Mesonet project’s goal is to develop a statewide automated environmental monitoring network of approximately 100 stations that will collect data and support a variety of products to serve needs across Kentucky, including agriculture, education, emergency management, engineering and construction, water supply management and weather forecasting.
Since the Mesonet’s first station at the WKU farm in Warren County became operational in May 2007, 19 other stations have been installed and plans for expanding the network are progressing. Other stations are located in Logan, Rowan, Calloway, Casey, Ohio, Adair, Bullitt, Fayette, Grayson, Allen, Caldwell, Knox, Christian, Franklin, Hopkins, Jackson, Owen, Lincoln and Breathitt counties.
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.
More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu and at http://wkunews.wordpress.com/. 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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