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Davis
Instruments Weather Club
June 2004
In This Issue:
Vantage Pro Helping to Restore Wisconsin Prairie
Kathie Brock with the Savanna Oak Foundation’s new Vantage Pro, which has been removed from its spot on a permanently installed pole. If you look carefully, you can see that each pole has a hole, and the station pole is fastened permanently to the in-ground pole by a large bolt. The nut is clamped down so that the outer pole presses on the inner one.
The station can be removed for annual controlled burns, and then
easily reinstalled.
Fifty years
ago, the residents of Dane County, Wisconsin, looked out over gently
rolling slopes of prairie. Farmers used controlled fires to keep
the slopes open. But modern residents of the area see a different
view: the hills are covered with red cedar and weeds, with only
tiny patches of prairie. But Tom and Kathie Brock are not about
to let the prairie plant community disappear: they run the Savanna
Oak Foundation, Inc., which is involved
in restoration of prairie and oak savanna vegetation in southwestern
Wisconsin. The Brocks recently installed a new Vantage Pro Plus
to help them in their work. Until now, they have had to depend on
the nearest weather station which was over 20 miles away.
“This part of
Wisconsin has quite variable weather,” Tom writes, “with yearly
rainfall varying from 20 to 40 inches. Also, the timing of rainfall
varies considerably from year to year. Further, rain often comes
during the summer in brief localized thunderstorms. It is not unusual
to have a half inch of rain at one location and no rain at all two
or three miles away.”
A major part
of the restoration work involves planting areas to be restored with
seeds of prairie plants. The success of seeding depends on the rainfall,
and the Brocks need to be able to interpret the results of their
work. But just knowing how much rain has fallen is only part of
the story for a plant’s survival. The Brocks are also very interested
in evapotranspiration, which their VP Plus, with its solar radiation
sensor, tells them.
Installing the
station was complicated by the fact that prairie restoration includes
yearly controlled burns, so the station had to be securely mounted,
yet movable.
“We set up
our Vantage Pro in the middle of one of our prairie plantings,”
Tom told us. “Nearby we have a small cabin (with electricity) that
is used by personnel involved in the work. The Vantage Pro console
is installed in this building. Because the weather station is in
the middle of an area that is burned, it must be movable. We use
two metal pipes, one which will fit inside the other. The smaller
pipe is mounted permanently in the ground, leaving four feet above
ground. The weather station is mounted on the larger pipe, which
is then placed over the permanent pipe. Each pipe has a hole through
which a bolt can be fitted. When the two holes are lined up and
the bolt fastened, the two pipes are fixed rigidly together. To
remove the weather station, we loosen the bolt and slip off the
pole with the weather station. After the controlled burn is completed
(which usually takes less than an hour), the weather station is
reinstalled.”
We are delighted
that our VP can help Tom and Kathie in this important work.
Your Picture Here
It’s that time
of year when we start working on our new weather catalog (and other
publications), featuring YOU and your Vantage Pro! We love to include
photos of real-life, hard working VP’s and their owners because
such photos really tell the story of weather watching and weather
stations. So send us your photos! We want photos of weather enthusiasts
and their Vantage Pros at work in unusual, fun, professional, and
even the more ho-hum locations for use in our catalogs, E-Newsletters,
website, and other publications.
What we’re looking
for are pictures of you and your weather station, including the
console, especially if you use your station in your work as a grower,
teacher, emergency service provider, student, researcher, or other
professional; or if your weather station reports on weather conditions
that are unusual or extreme. If you have an interesting photo of
you and the station itself being installed or just looking way cool,
we’d love to see that too.
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.
We can’t promise
to publish every photo we receive, but if we do use yours, we’ll
send you a Davis cap or T-shirt.
Sudden Climate Change Makes a Great Movie, But Could It Happen?
A recent movie,
“The Day After Tomorrow,” has us all feeling a bit nervous about
the weather. We’ve always taken global warming seriously – but the
idea that it could mean that one minute we’re lazing on the beach
in Los Angeles, and the next we’re being carried off to Oz by a
tornado is too terrifying to consider!
Could climate
change happen that fast? We hope not, and were comforted to find
several reliable sources who say, “no way.” We breathed a sigh of
relief reading a National
Geographic News interview by Stefan Lovgren with Tom Prugh,
senior editor at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C. Prugh
said, “There is evidence that abrupt climate change has happened
a couple of times in the last 13,000 years, but it's never happened
in a few days, as it does in the movie. That's completely impossible.”
And an MSNBC
story offers more comfort from the national Center of Atmospheric
Research and the Pew Center for Climate Change. Eileen Claussen,
the Director of the Pew Center, tells us that in climate-speak,
“abrupt” means over decades, rather than centuries. While most climate
change is gradual, scientists have reported evidence that “some
parts of the climate system work more like a switch than a dial:
if a certain temperature level is reached, there may be an abrupt
and large change in the climate. That’s why some scientists worry
about a catastrophic event – like the breakup of the West Antarctic
ice sheet or the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation.”
We feel a bit
better, but hope that the movie convinces more people that global
warming is something we need to take very seriously, even if it
is unlikely we’ll enter a sudden ice age while walking the dog in
Central Park.
Weather
Check Quiz Question 1: What is the thermohaline circulation?
Mail
Call!
Stan Batten, a
PhD grad of UCLA’s Atmospheric Sciences Department, wrote to add a
bit of fuel to the fire of the Santa Ana vs. Santana wind controversy
“I guess I
can only add to the confusion,” he warned. “While serving in the
fire weather section as a student trainee at the LA Weather Bureau
back in the late 1950's, I was told that Santana Winds was a bastardization
of Santa Ana Winds. But I guess we will never really know and may
as well be asking where the first chicken came from. With all due
respect to Mr. Fox's mother, the Glossary of Meteorology published
by the American Meteorological Society has no reference to Santana
Winds but has the following about Santa Ana Winds: ‘Santa Ana –
A hot, dry, foehn-like desert wind, generally from the northeast
or east, especially in the pass and river valley of Santa Ana, California,
where it is further modified as a mountain-gap wind.’”
We stirred up
some memories for Ned Hune, of Springfield, OH, in our discussion
of sling psychrometers.
“Boy, it's
been a long time since I've heard of one of those,” Ned wrote (sighing
nostalgically). “Back in the 60's, during Viet Nam, I was a weather
observer for the Air Weather Service. After a stint at the headquarters
of the Weather Bureau at Suitland, MD, where I worked with the automated
systems, I spent a year on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. We used
an automated psychrometer there. Now after all these years, I have
a Vantage Pro. I love having (in this one little console) all the
instrumentation I had in the station at Northeast Cape, Alaska.”
McCune, of
the Twin Oaks Intentional Community in Louisa, VA, took aim at our
assertion in our February E-News that typical household humidity
is lower in the winter than in the summer. He pointed out the importance
of insulation in keeping up the humidity. He wrote “that in a very
well insulated house, with normal household moisture sources present,
the indoor relative humidity in winter may be as high as or higher
than in summer. I live in such a house and have measured the relative
humidity so this is more than theoretical.” McCune’s house may have
excellent insulation, but he admits that “most people still live
in houses that are not tight and well insulated, so indoor relative
humidities are low in winter even with cooking, showering, plant
watering, and respiration- perspiration.”
In April, Dick
Jubinville of Boston, MA, seriously considered “hiding out on Mt.
Washington or building an ark” when his weather station reported
nearly 10 inches of rain for the month. He believes this is a new
record, offsetting the 1987 record of 9.56 inches. As a true weather
nut, he’s delighted – soggily!
Weather
Check Quiz Question 3: How close was Dick’s rainfall
reading to what Noah would have encountered? That is, if enough
rain fell to cover the mountain tops by 8 meters what would the
rainfall rate have been? (Our mom warned us never to discuss religion
or politics in polite society, but this is not polite society –
it’s the Weather Club and the topic is rainfall, not religion!)
Tech
Tip: Rain Collectors Can Collect Non-Rain Items
We nag you in the
summertime; we nag you in the wintertime: keep your rain collector
clean! Since the days of sunshine and spider webs are upon us in the
northern hemisphere, and chilly nights by the fire are upon you in
the southern, it seems a good time to nag yet again. Go out there
right now and remove your rain collector cone (turn it to the right
then lift it off). Wipe it clean with a soft cloth, and then inspect
the tipping bucket apparatus to make sure nothing is impeding its
movement.
Remove any spider
webs, pine needles, hornet nests (carefully!), bird droppings –
or for winter folks, ice that has built up and may restrict the
movement of the tipping buckets. If the bucket cannot tip, the most
common symptom would be no rainfall showing on the console, when
your umbrella reports a deluge. Another symptom seen occasionally
on VPs is the opposite: wildly incrementing rainfall, up to 14 inches
an hour, even when skies are clear and dry. In freezing conditions,
covering the rain collector will prevent a recurrence as will a
heater. 
Ari Ervaskivi,
who lives in Lohja, in Southern Finland, subjects his rain collector
to some very heavy loads of snow every winter. This February, his
homemade heater (it uses two 12V /15W light bulbs) could not keep
up with the snow dumped in his rain collector by a big, ten-hour
snowstorm. “My rain collector melted about 52 cm snow to 52 mm of
water,” he wrote. “And then my rain collector shouted to me ‘Heat!
Give me some more HEAT!’” Ari responded with a “hot water bottle
solution” as seen above. Ari’s solution is touching, but we’re worried
he’ll freeze himself running back and forth with more hot water!
Weather
Check Quiz Question 3: Extreme weather fans call something the
“Bear’s Cage.” What are they referring to?
A. The reinforced
cab area of a storm chaser’s truck;
B. The area
bordered by the Rockies to the west and the Mississippi River to
the east where most tornados hit;
C. The feeling
of dread storm chasers feel in the eerie silence that often precedes
a tornado – like being in the bear’s cage before he wakes up and
notices;
D. The area
of a storm that produces the most intense rainfall and hail – usually
north and east of the storm;
E. A saloon
in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, built in 1923, that has survived 15 tornados,
one fire, and two Board of Alcohol raids.
Davis is the Darling of the Press
It seems that every
time we open a magazine or newspaper, there we are. The Vantage Pro
is just so photogenic and fascinating that it gets plenty of mention.
For example, we recently enjoyed seeing a lovely shot of a VP console,
surrounded by students at St. Mary’s Elementary and Junior High School
in Sycamore, IL in the Dekalb Daily Chronicle. The kids find that
the two roof-mounted stations, purchased with a grant from Toyota’s
Investment in Mathematics Excellence, make learning and using math
way more fun than the old fashioned textbook way. Two more stations
will be purchased next year, and the kids will be able to really delve
into the study of microclimates.
Weather
Check Quiz Question 4: How small can a microclimate be?
Old
Topic That Won’t Die: How Long Did It Take to Broil the Dinosaurs?
A year ago, in
our June 2003 issue, we started a discussion about how long it took
for most of the dinosaurs to be incinerated after the crash of a meteor
off the Yucatan peninsula. The scientists at the National Museum of
History’s Department of Paleobiology claim it happened “within minutes”
after the impact. But some of our readers disagreed, and we had to
admit that the idea of almost every large living thing on earth being
burnt to a crisp “within minutes” was kind of hard to imagine. The
idea that the extinction was slower, possibly taking many years and
resulting from a combination of natural disasters has been thoroughly
kicked around by paleobiologists.
We recently
ran across a story by Robert
Roy Britt for space.com that reports that the latest thinking
concludes it was more like “a matter of hours.” Britt based his
assertion on a new study, lead by Doug Robertson of the University
of Colorado at Boulder and reported in the May June issue of the
Bulletin of the Geological
Society of America.
According to
Britt, Roberts and his colleagues think that “superheated stuff
was blasted from the crater into a suborbital path around the Earth,
generating a ‘heat pulse’ upon reentry.” Those animals that were
lucky enough to have been hiding deep in some cave when the meteor
hit, would have wandered out to be treated to what Roberts called,
“enough heat to make the normally blue sky turn red hot for hours.”
When the show was over, they would have found themselves in a dark
world of fire, radiation, ash, and certain starvation.
Not exactly
what we call lucky.
Weather
Check Quiz Question 5: Some scientists say the meteor was just the final straw in the demise of the dinosaurs. They say a weather phenomenon had already begun the task long before the skies rained fire. What phenomenon was that?
You're
Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions
Question
1:
The thermohaline circulation refers to global ocean circulation,
powered by changes in water temperature and salinity (thermo = heat,
haline = salinity). It’s all about density – just like in air movement.
Less dense, salty, warm water is carried northward by the Gulf Stream,
where it cools and mixes with cold artic water – becoming more dense
and less salty – and sinks, and then moves southward. According
to W. Becker,
writing in Scientific American, “Once the waters are in the deep,
they remain out of the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years.”
According to
Eileen Claussen, the Atlantic thermohaline circulation is “like
an oceanic conveyor belt that carries heat from the topics to the
North Atlantic region.”
How does it
tie into global warming and therefore weather? We know the ocean
is the mighty mover of warmth from the tropics northward. Predictions
about the effects of global warming include rising water temperatures
and the melting of glaciers, which would increase the freshwater
in the ocean. The concern is that global warming could “shut down”
the circulation, causing heat to concentrate in the tropics. According
to Claussen, this scenario is “possible, but not likely.”
A good illustration
of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation is on a webpage by Tim
Osborn.
Question
2: According to the website of Adrian
Barnett, who we feel safe in saying is not a believer,
there would have had to have been a rain rate of 259,800 inches
per month, or about 259,790 more inches than Dick’s weather station
recorded. Barnett arrived at this figure by figuring the volume
of the earth’s sphere and subtracting it from the volume of a sphere
whose radius is 8.8 km (the height of Mt. Everest) greater, then
figuring out how much rain would have had to fall to fill this volume
in 40 days.
Question
3: The answer is D., but we’d love for it to be E.
Question
4 : A microclimate is any local area or zone in which the climate is different from surrounding areas. It can be as small as your pet snake’s cage (too much humidity and Fido gets a fungus, too little heat and he gets cranky) or as large as a city. (See our story on Urban Islands, in the August 2003 E-News.)
Question
5 : Cold. Oxygen isotope readings taken in Alberta, Canada showed
a drop in temperature during the 7 million years preceding the meteor
with average temperatures dropping from 25ºC to 15ºC. Dinosaurs
were cold-blooded and would have found the temperature change hard
to deal with. In the short term they would have been able to survive,
but not over the long term. For more on this theory, see BBC
News World Edition.
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.
Well, that’s
it for this edition. You’ll be hearing from us again next month!
Vantage Pro,
Weather Monitor, Weather Wizard, WeatherLink, Weather Envoy, Weather
Echo and Weather Echo Plus, EZ Mount Gro Weather, EZ Mount EnviroMonitor,
EZ Mount Health EnviroMonitor, and Perception are trademarks of
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