18 January 2008 What Would YOU Measure?

Local Posting Day and Time- 1-18-08 8:37PM  Central Standard Posting Day and Time- 1-18-08 1:37AM

McMurdo's Weather

    Temperature-  36F Its a heat wave!!!

Wind Direction- Northeast Wind Speed-  12 MPH Wind Chill-      27F

Answer to Yesterday’s WATIZIT.

  Very good job from Mrs. Robert's 3D and 3R classes!!!

They figured out that the tracks were from a penguin. As they pointed out it was difficult to tell the size and dimensions from the picture.

Today’s WATIZIT

George and I are scheduled to fly to a weather station via helicopter tomorrow. The station is at this location... 77.990 N and 166.568 S.

What is the name of the station? (Hint: It is not transmitting data.)

If you were going to measure the weather, what would you measure? Since weather is so complicated you might think a weather station would need to take a lot of different kinds of measurements, but they don’t. If you look at the station you can see that there really are not very many parts.

Basically the station takes measurements about the local weather and then every few minutes it sends the measurements to a satellite, which sends the information back to computers here on Earth, and then the data is sent to computers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It takes energy to do that. The energy needed by each weather station comes from a set of batteries, which are inside a wooden box (they look like a battery that you would have in your car).

 AWS Batteries in Wooden Box

Each station has a solar panel to charge the batteries. 

AWS Solar Panel

There are really only four main things that these weather stations measure: temperature, air pressure, wind (both speed and direction), and humidity. Some of the stations also have an acoustic depth gauge which measures how far down it is to the snow surface. 

ADG bounces sound waves off the snow to measure the distance to the snow.

Most of the instruments are at the top of the station. The really obvious thing looks like a windmill. This measures the wind direction and the wind speed.

 AWS Anemometer

Hanging down from the beam is a small cylinder, inside the cylinder is a device that measures the temperature.

AWS Temperature Sensor

Also mounted under the metal beam is an instrument with a gold-colored tip, this measures the humidity.

 AWS Humidity Sensor

The weather stations also have an antennae to transmit the data up to the satellite.

  AWS Antennae

Inside the metal box which is mounted to the tower, is an air pressure sensor.

 AWS Air Pressure Sensor