A portion of a statewide weather-monitoring system is up and running on ESF’s Newcomb Campus.
A 35-foot tower, part of New York state’s Mesonet system, was deployed in October on the campus in the central Adirondacks. Mesonet, an interconnected weather system, will provide four-dimensional imagery of the weather, allowing more accurate and more reliable forecasts and decision–making.
The network provides real-time weather condition data to support emergency management, research and condition-dependent industries vital to New York’s economy, such as agriculture and energy production, according to the program’s website.
Originally developed in Oklahoma, the network was designed to help predict severe weather events such as tornadoes. After Superstorm Sandy hit the New York City area in 2012, Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed building a similar 125-station weather network in New York to provide emergency planners statewide with more real-time data to prepare for major storms.
The system has uses beyond weather prediction, said Brian Houseal, director of the Adirondack Ecological Center in Newcomb. “There are a number of applications beyond catastrophic-weather prediction,” he said. The data can be used to help road crews calculate how much road salt will be needed during a snowstorm, assist farmers in developing irrigation and spraying schedules and provide data useful in global environmental change (climate change) research.
“It’s a very sophisticated apparatus,” Houseal said.
The tower houses a suite of automated sensors that measure humidity, wind direction and speed, barometric pressure, solar radiation and soil temperature at various depths. Data sampling occurs every three to 30 seconds. Data are then packaged into five-minute averages and transmitted in real time to a central facility at SUNY Albany. There, data from all sites are quality-controlled and processed into files that are distributed to customers for use in forecasting and decision-making.
Work is underway to translate the information gathered from hard data into information for the public, said Houseal. “Everything in the research and monitoring world is becoming available in real time. The challenge is to make that information manageable and useful, and ESF has the talent to do that.”
The Newcomb campus is no stranger to weather monitoring. Researchers have been taking measurements for decades to monitor atmospheric conditions related to acid rain in the Adirondacks. With the success of the cap-and-trade legislation that set limits for energy plants on greenhouse gas emissions and required them to buy credits to exceed those caps, levels of nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide in rain have decreased, allowing the environment to recover.
“We’re at the threshold of ecological recovery for the lakes and forests in the Adirondacks,” said Houseal, “so we can reduce the frequency of that particular sampling and expand our research and monitoring to the environmental changes related to a shifting climate at the ESF Newcomb Huntington Wildlife Forest.” Because of this,
the Mesonet is a timely addition to ESF’s monitoring station, he said. Houseal and the ESF team will work to dovetail the two data sets.
“ESF is proud to partner with SUNY Albany and Gov. Cuomo on this proactive stance on climate change and automating the information as much as we can,” said Houseal.
Anyone can see the station data collected by the Mesonet towers at www.nysmesonet.org. The Mesonet can also be found on Facebook and Twitter and a phone app is being developed.