The WSU AgWeatherNet team recently installed a weather station at WSU’s Spillman Agronomy Farm located two miles southeast of Pullman. The station is equipped with sensors for monitoring and recording air temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, solar radiation, leaf wetness, soil temperature and moisture at a depth of eight inches, and rainfall.
“The ease at which current and historical weather data from across the state can be viewed is impressive” said Spillman Farm manager Ryan Davis of the AgWeatherNet system.
AgWeatherNet provides online access to raw data derived from a network of 77 publicly owned, regional weather stations. Most stations are located in the irrigated regions of eastern Washington state and provide updated data at 15-minute intervals.
The AWN team is also in the midst of discussions for integrating weather station data from two additional Pullman farms, Cook Agronomy Farm and the Palouse Conservation Research Station into the AWN network.
WSU’s Lind Dryland Research Station in Adams County was also recently added to the AWN network, and eight additional dryland locations are planned.
“Given the inclement weather conditions, we are extremely pleased with the expansion and retrofit progress currently being made by our field technical coordinators, Will Corsi and Evan Zumini,” said Bob Krebs, AWN Project Operations Manager.
Once the dryland sites are completed, AWN will have a presence near Almira, Anatone, Fairfield, Rearden, Ritzville, St. Andrews, St. John and Waitsburg, in addition to Pullman and Lind. The expansion is a part of an overall project to retrofit and expand the existing network of regional weather stations from 57 to more than 120. The project is expected to be completed by March of 2009.
Registration to the AWN network (http://weather.wsu.edu) is free and open the public. Once registered, users may log in at any time to view or download data.
