• History
  David Warren, system programmer, Dept. Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington was asked to help and took the initiative installing a weather station with Fred Weller
• The sensors, system and software allow far higher resolution than Weather Service and most other systems
• Neal Johnson added the school variables to his plotting program
• Tillman defined the data rates, averaging frequency and reporting characteristics and created with Johnson, the priority list for enhancement of Johnson's and Warren's software
• Characteristics of sensors and system, ( and contrasts with others)
  • Continuous sampling, (not every hour or so), at intervals of ~ 1 second
  • One minute averages and instantaneous maximum values of winds are reported
  • Archiving of all wind data during days of extreme events
  • Solar radiation, (not available from the weather service)
  • Our rain gauge reports every 0.01 inch when it occurs
• The site is processsed with both public and developmental software
• The original 386 has been upgraded to a 486 obtained by Rosemary Aragon, University Rotary and from Group Health, at Tillman's request
• A demonstration of automatically relaying these data directly to Tillman's Mars NetLander colleagues in Finland without, intervention

• Extreme instantaneous winds
  • The Coe system is already producing data unique enough in time resolution and continuity of observations to generate controversy in the Atmospheric Sciences Dept.

    This example includes the three frames beginning on 3 March 1999, at 07:00 and continuing through 4 March, 12:00, showing: in the top frame, one minute average wind in red and instantaneous, peak wind sampled at one second intervals, in blue, the higher of the two traces. The second frame shows the solar radiation for the same time while the third indicates the rainfall by a vertical line every time 0.01 inch is collected in the rain gauge. The sensor was calibrated to 110 MPH before installation.

    
    

    Wind speed
    Note, all times are GMT which is 8 hours later than PST
    
    Solar Radiation
    
    Rainfall
    Expansion of our school network will better define these events, and even more important, it will provide students with primary information that they can compare with each other, and present to their fellow students and the public. It will be especially interesting to see how the average and peak winds vary around the Puget Sound region, since they are strongly affected by the Olympics and local topography, the height of measurement, and the surrounding buildings and trees.

• Solar radiation; lightning, thunder, rain, hail
  • Solar Radiation is not measured by the weather service at normal stations
  • An interesting wind speed-rainfall-radiation example from Sat., Feb. 27 and Sun. Feb. 28, 1999, shows 1) paritally clear morning, 2) broken clouds, 3) sunlight dropping from about 800 Watts/Meter-square to about 0 at 21:00 GMT, 13:00 local time, and the tipping bucket rain gauge showing a great downpour. At the same time, the wind speed, previously moderate, reached peaks of 40 knots during that hour at about 21:00 GMT.

    

    Wind speed: one minute average (red), instantaneous max (blue)

    

    Solar radiation in Watts/(square meter)
    

    

    Precipitation: each line is 0.01 inches of rain

  • One colleague said that an inch of hail was on the ground but at home, about 5 miles away, I only had thunder, lightning, and RAIN
  • The combination of wind speed and direction, solar radiation and rain gauge are providing unique information during this year where the La Nina and a decadel oscillation have synchronized to produce these frequent, violent storms.

• These and other examples demonstrate that these data are important in research as well as educational context even with one site
• They clearly show that the 486 running Linux and Unidata is completely adequate as a weather data ingestor, archiving and relay system

This page is: http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~mars/weather_school/weather_coe.html
Linked from      http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~mars/
Italicized font indicate active web link

J Tillman; Revised 23/062001