• Vantage Pro Steals the “Victory Garden” Show
• NEW Davis Caps and Tees Make Fashion World Tremble
• Wild Weather Tales from Dullsville
• MAC Users Now Even Smarter and Happier
• Your Photo Here
• Our Weather Station Hero: All Alone Through the Antarctic Winter
• Tech Tips: Which Wind Cups for Your Anemometer?
• You’re Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions
• Who You Gonna Call? Davis!

Joe wrote that he enjoyed seeing “Michael Weishan, the new host of the show (who replaces long favorite Roger Swain) boasting about his new Vantage Pro and how it greatly helps in the garden and the show.” Vantage Pro owners really should try not to boast, but hey, it’s awfully hard not to, isn’t it?

NEW Davis Caps and Tees Make Fashion World Tremble
We know what’s on your roof, but what’s on your head? If you are truly a cool person, and we know you are, there’s soon to be a DAVIS CAP up there! Everyone here at Davis is wearing them because, hey, we never miss a fashion trend, and because they really go well with our NEW DAVIS T-SHIRTS!

The baseball-style caps are very classy 100% cotton twill in washed khaki with a dark-colored bill and the Davis logo embroidered on the front. They have self-fabric closure with a brass buckle.

The shirts are white with beautiful blue weather photos on the front and back. (Our descriptive skills are terrific, we know, but you can see an actual picture on our website at http://www.davisnet.com.)

Now you, too, can be so cool! Get your own Davis cap ($12) and t-shirt ($16) by clicking here.

Wild Weather Tales from Dullsville
When Ben Faber opened his Christmas gift from his wife and found a brand new Davis Vantage Pro, he was suddenly sad to be living in Phoenix, Arizona, which, he says, “is not known for exciting weather – it’s dull and boring.” Apparently, the gods of wild weather were displeased by the insult and sent Ben and the rest of Phoenix a doozy of a storm in July.

Ben was duly impressed. “I was right here in front of my console the whole time – except when I was checking for roof leaks. Starting at 8:30 in the evening the temperature was 101 degrees. At the 9:30 measurement it had cooled down to 70, and we had received exactly 2 inches of rain! Very unusual in the first place, but to receive it that fast was quite scary in the desert. I live up against a mountain here in town and the water was gushing out wherever it could. Many of my neighbors had flooding problems in their houses, but we got lucky. The most fascinating reading found on the weather station was at one point during the storm we were receiving rain at the rate of just under 8.5 inches an hour! I don't have any previous data to compare it to, but I'd have to guess that's about as hard as it can rain. Time will tell, but I don't expect to see anything like that again for quite some time. I would be curious what other users around the country have recorded as a maximum rain rate.”

Ben is probably aware that he can set a Flash Flood Alarm on his Vantage Pro. The default Flash Flood Alarm is 0.50” in 15 minutes, but you can change that setting according to the danger of flash flooding in your area.

Weather Check Quiz Question 1: Ben now has us wondering. Just how hard can it rain?

MAC Users Now Even Smarter and Happier
Mac fans had much to celebrate in July! In addition to a published report that said Mac users are smarter than everyone else, Davis announced its new WeatherLink software for Mac OSX. (Don’t tell this old PC here, but our new home I-Mac is much prettier than it is. Perhaps someone can do some research and prove that Mac users are also much prettier…)

Boomerang Champion Chet Snouffer, of Leading Edge Boomerangs wrote, “Way to go! I knew you had it in you to make the most innovative weather gear compatible with the most innovative computer platform in the world!”

Leading Edge Boomerangs’ webpage says Chet “is the Michael Jordan of the boomerang world. He will be written down in the history books as the greatest boomerang thrower of all time."

We are extra honored that the site also calls Davis weather stations the “best and most cost effective.” Check out this fun site at http://www.leadingedgeboomerangs.com — it will tell you everything you’ve wanted to know about boomerang throwing.

Don Fuller was happy about the Mac news too. “As an OS X devotee, I'm looking forward to your new software!” But our comments about the “skin effect” of lighting on the metal of a car worries Don, who drives a plastic Saturn…

Weather Check Quiz Question 2: What makes a boomerang work the way it does?(Hey, throwing a boomerang requires air, and works best in a light, steady breeze, so that qualifies it as a weather question, right?)

Your Photo Here
It’s not too late to send us your photo with your Vantage Pro weather station. You just might see yourself smiling out of on of our future catalogs, e-newsletters, or webpage. We are particularly looking for photographs of YOU with your station, particularly Vantage Pro consoles. (We love our Monitor and Wizard owners, too, but our need is for Vantage Pro. However, if your Davis station is in an unusually interesting setting, we want to see a picture of it, whatever model it is!)

Just take a photo of you and your Vantage Pro and send it to us via email at news@davisnet.com, or mail to Weather Club, Davis Instruments, 3465 Diablo Avenue, Hayward, CA 94545. We won’t be able to return photos. Please include your full name, address, email address, and phone number with your photo. By contributing your photograph, you give us permission to use and publish the photograph, so you must be over 21 or have parental permission in writing.

Our Weather Station Hero: All Alone Through the Antarctic Winter
Back in December of 2000, we told you about a group of researchers from Stanford University who were setting off to install two Davis weather stations in Antarctica. Under the direction of Professor Robert Twiggs, Director of the Space System Development Laboratory, and industry mentor Ronald Ross, the group of undergraduate engineering students intended to track wind, temperature, and solar and UV radiation in the harsh Antarctic environment. UV data was of special interest because of its relationship to ozone depletion over the continent.

So, on a sunny January day in 2001, Ron and his entourage climbed up a rocky outcrop in the Drowning Maud Land area of Antarctica, planted a Health EnviroMonitor nicknamed Blue One, then trekked to a spot on Holtana Mountain 40 miles away and set up another one. He and his students had modified the stations with radios, beefed-up solar panels, and extra tethering cables against high winds. The stations would report data in APRS packets to radio then to polar satellites, which passed over six times a day. The information would then be relayed to a research station 600 miles away. Finally, the data would be emailed to the researchers in California.

Ron reported that the stations worked perfectly, allowing the researchers to access the data directly until they left in February. However, they could not remotely access the data until September 2001 when SANAE, the research base in South African was able to complete the data bridge.

“We then knew that Blue One had made it through the Antarctic winter from May to September,” Ron told us.

Although the researchers continued to receive data during the summer, they had no way of knowing how the station had physically borne the extremes of the dark winter. In February of this year, they had a chance to find out. A pilot who was flying into the area volunteered to visit one of the stations and photograph it. What he found amazed even Ron, because the station was standing tall, anemometer whirring, with the only damage being a loose and easily repaired tether cable.

Poor Blue One is now enduring its second Antarctic winter. “Now we are waiting for the sun to rise again around October to see if the stations will make it though a second winter,” Ron told us.

Now our researchers have plans to install another station at an adventure travel company’s landing strip at Patriot Hills. The station would not only provide data for the research, but would help pilots determine actual weather conditions at Patriot Hills before they took off.

And there are plans to make the system even more useful and less power-demanding. For some time, the group has dreamed of having a camera installed on the weather station. However, pictures require a lot of power and the demands of constant broadcast to a polar satellite meant that solar power would not be enough. Enter the Iridium Phone: a modem that works like a “stationary satellite,” to which the station and the researchers can both dial up. (Iridium phones use the Iridium Space Sector, a network of 66 low-orbit satellites which cover the earth with narrow, clear-linking beams. When the phone is activated, the message picked up by the nearest satellite. To learn more about Iridium Phones, read http://blizzard.rwic.und.edu/~nordlie/papers/irridium.html.) The communication cost and power needs will be dramatically reduced, making a camera a viable addition to the station.

The possibilities of using wireless weather stations to study Antarctica are endless. For example, Ron discussed the possibility of attaching a sensitive inclinometer and placing stations on Antarctic icebergs to gather data on how the weather affects iceberg travel and break up.

Professor Twiggs is especially excited about wireless technology’s gift to students and researchers all over the world: they are no longer limited by geographical requirements. Someday soon, he thinks, school children in Vermont will study animal colonies in Alaska through wireless transmissions from animal collars and weather stations just as our students in Palo Alto can dial up real time weather on an 8,000 foot high mountain top in Antarctica.

Needless to say, we’re excited by the possibilities, too. But around here, seeing that picture of our sturdy little Health EnviroMonitor, still faithfully monitoring the weather after having survived the long dark Antarctic winter all alone was simply exhilarating!

The data reported by Blue One is on the web at http://thistle.org/Wx2000/B1_Wx.htm . It shows a summer time high at a blistering 37°F in January, a low of -18°F in October. Winds rarely drop below 10 mph, with a gusty day in November registering 76 mph winds. But of real interest is the data on solar radiation and UV Index. In December, the station reported more than one day with a UV Index of 9.8, with most summer days in the 7’s. The station reported solar radiation at 1265 W/m^2 in December. On a sunny June day in sunny Hayward, California, our weather stations might report data close to these! Barrow, Alaska, which is roughly the same latitude but north instead of south, reported a solar radiation max of 641 W/m^2 under mostly clear skies on June 21st. The seemingly high numbers reported by Blue One are probably the striking result of the thinning ozone layer above Antarctica.

If those numbers don’t scare you, and/or you own a sun block company, you might want to check out Adventure Network International which offers 10-day visits to Patriot Hills, including flying to the Amundsen Scott research base near the South Pole. Raid your piggy bank! All you need is $25,000 in small change... Their website is at http://www.adventure-network.com/our_journeys/south_pole/. And just where is Patriot Hills? Click here for a map: http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/meteorobot/Antarctica/Patriot_Hills.html

Weather Check Quiz Question 3: While in Antarctica, our intrepid researchers may have been tempted to go hunting. Antarctica is considering the world’s premier hunting grounds for what? (Hint: It’s not animal…nor vegetable…)

Extra Credit: Which does Antarctica have more of: pay phones or airports?

Extra Extra Credit: You are standing right smack dab on the South Pole. What is the wind direction?

Tech Tips: Which Wind Cups for Your Anemometer?
Do you live in hurricane country? If you do, your Davis weather station’s anemometer is ready to meet one. Our anemometers are built with such rugged components that one of our stations reported winds up to 175 mph during hurricane Andrew – and would have continued had its tower not been blown down!

While the wind speeds most people want to track with their weather station are well under hurricane levels, there are those of you out there whose homes and businesses are buffeted by extreme winds. In that case, the large wind cups that came standard with your station may not be exactly right. You should know that Davis offers easy to install smaller wind cups which provide the most accurate readings for high winds.

The standard 1.5” large cups offer a range of 2 mph to 150 mph with an accuracy of ± 2 mph. For most users, this range is perfect, and especially useful for capturing data on everyday, gentle breezes. The small cups, with a diameter of 1”, have an extended high end range, from 3 to 175 mph. The extended high end range comes at the cost of slightly reduced accuracy of ± 3 mph, and there will be some gentle breezes that are not recorded.

How do you decide which cups are right for you? Our friends at Stanford chose the small cups for their Antarctica stations because of the constant katabatic winds their station endures. They are also more interested in data on high winds than gentle ones. On the other hand, if you live where there is little or no chance of such extreme winds conditions, the large cups that came with your station will provide you with the most accurate readings.

If you want to switch to small cups, they are easily installed with only an Allen wrench (included). They are available for $12.00 – order online at http://www.davisnet.com/weather/products/weather_product.asp?pnum=07903S , call our Customer Service department at 1-800-678-3669, or email sales@davisnet.com.

Weather Check Quiz Question 4: Are you hooked on quizzes? Here’s a question from the “hard” quiz on the Penn State Department of Meteorology’s Weather World webpage (a great resource for teachers and weather buffs alike!) at http://www.ems.psu.edu/WeatherWorld . For the rest of the test, (on which we did just pretty good) go to http://www.ems.psu.edu/WeatherWorld/Tough/quiz.cgi.

“Which of the following combinations of temperature and relative humidity have never been measured at a weather station: A) temperature 0°F, humidity 100%; B) temperature 25°F, humidity 25%; C) temperature 75°F, humidity 5%; D) temperature 95°, humidity 95%.”

You’re Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions
Question 1: According to “The Weather Book,” Arizona’s record rainfall happened in September 1970 when they got 11.4 inches over a two-day period. Remembered as “The Great Labor Day Storm,” it caused a creek near Sunflower to crest 36 feet above creek bed and killed 23 people.

But that doesn’t answer Ben’s question as to how hard it can rain. Well, sorry Ben, but your little storm wasn’t quite up to standards. According to “The Handy Weather Answer Book,” the greatest 1-minute rain total in the U.S. was 1.23" of rain in Unionville, MD, recorded on July 4, 1956. That is an average of 73.80"/hour over that one minute. The greatest 1-minute rain total in the world was 1.50" of rain in Barst, Guadaloupe, West Indies, November 26, 1970. That is an average of 90"/hour in one minute.

It’s notable that there is a difference in the way official measurements are made and the way the Vantage Pro does it. The Vantage Pro measures rainfall by measuring the time elapsed between tips of the tip bucket. (Each tip is 0.01” of rain.) That rate (tips over time) is expressed as an hourly rate, and the console displays the current, real-time rate, which might vary over the course of a minute. However, it stores and graphs the highest rate over the hour, day, or month. Official totals are measured by taking the total rainfall in any one minute. Expression as an average hourly rate is achieved by multiplying by 60.

Question 2: Well, a person who is very talented throws it just right. And also there is some aerodynamic and gyroscopic stuff going on but you don’t want to know about that.

Oh, you do? Why? Boomerangs were boomeranging for thousands of years before anyone even heard of a thing called “gyroscopic precession.” But if you must know, it’s because of the shape of the wings of the boomerang make them, like airplane wings, airfoils that generate lift. In addition, the way boomerangs are thrown, vertically and with a spin, causes more lift to be generated on the top of the spin. Gyroscopic precession states that any force applied to a spinning object will take effect 90 degrees forward in the direction of the spin from where the force was applied. So while the lift force is happening on the top of the spin, the result is at the front – that’s what causes the boomerang to turn and come back. Or so say the very smart guys at http://www.leadingedgeboomerangs.com.

Question 3: There is no better place on earth to hunt for meteorites than Antarctica! This is partly because it is a whole lot easier to pick out a meteorite when it is sitting all alone on a sheet of ice than tossed in among a pile of earth rocks. But even more important is that the geological forces in Antarctica cause old deep ice to be pushed to the surface. Strong katabatic (is that a cool weather word, or what?) winds remove volumes of ice and prevent snow from building up, leaving a lag deposit of meteorites just waiting to be picked up. Want to go hunting in Antarctica? Check out http://www.cwru.edu/affil/ansmet/faqs.html#Q2.

Extra Credit: Pay phones: 0; Airports: 19. (Source: CIA Fact Sheet)

Extra Extra Credit: North, every time. Think about it. (This is kind of trick question. Although on the South Pole every direction is due north, that isn’t very practical. By convention, South Pole directions are assigned, with north being along with Prime Meridian/ 0° longitude (toward western Africa), and south along the International Date Line/180° longitude (toward New Zealand). This is similar to aviation convention, which states 0° or 360° as north, and 180° as south everywhere.)

Question 4: The answer is D. “The combination of 95° and 95% relative humidity would result in a dew point temperature (a measure of absolute humidity) in the lower 90s. Very moist air can be found over very warm bodies of water, and the dew point of this air is normally a few degrees lower than the surface water temperature. The highest recorded sea-surface temperature was 96°F in the Persian Gulf. Therefore, the highest potential dew point was in the lower 90s along the shores of the Persian Gulf, but this has never been measured at an official weather station.”

Who You Gonna Call?
Each month after the E-News goes out, we receive messages back. Sometimes the messages are in response to a story we shared; other times they are a request for help of some kind. We read all the emails, answer those we can, and pass the rest on to the appropriate departments.

We think you should know, though, that if you're interested in the fastest possible reply, news@davisnet.com may not be the best place to send your message. Questions about how things work should be addressed to tech support directly at support@davisnet.com. For general information about the products, such as how much cable comes with a station contact sales@davisnet.com. To request a catalog, you’ll find links for catalog requests on our web site at http://www.davisnet.com/contact/catalog.asp

Please continue to send your comments, weather URLs, and story suggestions to news@davisnet.com. We look forward to getting your comments and any responses you have to the E-News. Member participation is what keeps the E-News alive and kicking.

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