Davis Instruments Weather Club
September 1998

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Here's a quick preview of this month's contents:
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Davis engineers eyeball the new millennium .... Tips on how to ready your station for the gusts and shivers of the coming season .... News of intrepid stations racing into the eye of the storm .... And, finally, a reader's top-notch web suggestion .... Enjoy!

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Davis Weather Stations - The Next Generation
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Our engineers are constantly dreaming up new projects and possibilities for the new millennium. But are these projects what you really want? As Davis looks to the next generation of weather stations, our engineers pass the baton over to you with an open invitation to participate in the design process.

E-mail us at news@davisnet.com, telling us what your ideal station would be. Then tell us what you'd be willing to spend to have it. If you think we could or should respond to a specific weather monitoring need or to a particular industry, we'd like to know that too. We'll describe some of your proposed stations in a future newsletter and invite club members to vote for their favorite (with the proposed price tag included). The most popular entry will win one of our much-adored Weather Forecasting Quick Reference Cards. This is your chance to mold Davis' product line to *your* specifications - so email us with your ideas!

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How-To: Beware the Critters
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As we say goodbye to summer, we recommend performing a little maintenance/cleanup on your weather equipment to prep it for the cold, wet seasons to come. There are two basic tasks - clean up the external equipment and check all connections.

During the warmer months it is likely that bugs and other critters have taken up residence on or near your external equipment. Be sure to clean your anemometer and rain collector thoroughly with a soft moist cloth. This includes the inside of the rain collector and its tipping bucket mechanism. Spider webs, critters, and dirt in general can impair their performance.

Before the cold and dampness sets in you should check all connections to make sure they are secure and free from corrosion. It is especially important for any splice or connection that is outside and exposed to the elements to be protected from the weather. We advise using the yellow crimp-type splice connectors and black cylindrical shells provided with our extension cords to safeguard the connections from the elements. Additionally, it's a darn good idea to have cable ties or clips securing the wiring on either side of each connection/splice as stabilizers.

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Cool Applications: Storm Chasing
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In last month's news, we mentioned that Davis weather stations were used on the chase vehicles in the movie "Twister". Well, our weather stations are used on chase vehicles in real life too! Steve Marshall of the Great Lakes Severe Storm Chase Team and Richard Barnett and Warren Faidley of Twister Search '98 are some of the many chasers using Davis weather stations. The chasers mount the anemometer to the roof of their vehicle to track wind speed and direction and place the console inside the car to display the readings. We talked to Steve Marshall about his chases.

Steve says he uses the barometric pressure gauge ahead of time to indicate when a big storm may be approaching - the pressure drops before a storm. During the actual chase, Steve monitors the dewpoint, wind speed and wind direction. The dewpoint is important because it indicates how much moisture has piled up before the storm front - the more moisture, the larger the storm. He keeps an eye on the wind speed to see if he's approaching the center of the storm or if he's on an outflow path. Steve also watches for a change in wind direction that would indicate that the front has passed.

Steve's Great Lakes Severe Storm Chase Team spends time talking at schools about how tornadoes form, teaching the basics of storm safety, and treating kids to tours of their chase car. They've visited over a thousand schools in Pennsylvania.

You can read more about storm chasers, their activities and tracking techniques, at the Storm Track Online News Magazine - http://storm-track.com.

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Talk Back: Davis Weblink Warehouse
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Kevin Leitch, a club member and Monitor II with WeatherLink owner in Utah, writes to us with "just a suggestion..."

>With more and more Davis users posting their weather data to the web it would be nice to add a page to your web site containing links to various URL's that have weather data generated by your products.

>My page has been listed with NOAA for some time now and I'm sure other stations on their page are also using Davis hardware. The NOAA site is: http://nimbo.wrh.noaa.gov/Saltlake/slc.web.current.html (look for Peoa in the list)

We think Kevin has a great idea! It is now up to you, our club members, to send in URLs of weather pages that access Davis stations. When we get a dozen or more, we'll happily create a new web page with the ability to register more web addresses. So send in those URLs and watch for the address of the new web page in upcoming E-newsletters!

Please don't hesitate to respond to news@davisnet.com with any suggestions, questions, or stories of your own. Let us know if you'd like your name or hometown to appear in the E-newsletter and, if so, remember to include it in your email!

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That's it for September's E-news! We look forward to hearing from you! To subscribe to this e-newsletter go to: http://davisnet.com/news/e_club_signup.asp