By AMBER DILLEY
MERRY OAKS — Weeks after devastating weather hit the area, Barren County is getting its own operating mesonet station to gather weather data.
A mesonet station is a precipitation and weather system that gathers local data and transmits the data to a Web site and to the National Weather Service.
“The Barren County station is online,” said Dr. Stuart Foster, director of Kentucky Mesonet. “The station was turned on Wednesday and needs to be monitored to make sure all the instruments are working correctly.”
Foster expects the station information to be available to the public by Monday on the organization’s Web site, www.kymesonet.org.
The Barren County station, on land owned by Neil and Diane Allen in the Merry Oaks area, will pick up information about temperature, precipitation, solar radiation, wind speed and direction.
“It’s pretty neat,” Diane Allen said about the small station. “We were happy to let them put it here. It collects a lot of important weather information.”
The data are collected every 15 minutes and will be available to the public on the Web site.
“People like farmers, emergency managers and energy companies use the information to predict what will happen and the demand for electricity,” Foster said.
The stations throughout the state provided interesting information during the recent storms, Foster said.
“The ice storm was an interesting dilemma because the ice accumulation caused some problems with the instruments,” he said. “Our stations continued to operate, but our wind monitors were covered in ice, which was how we knew there was ice accumulation. Instead of telling the wind, they froze solid — our wind monitors became ice detectors. A few weeks after that, we had strong storms with high winds and we were able to measure peak wind gusts of about 70 mph.”
Anyone who had storm damage could use the information to document it, Foster said.
“It gave advanced warning to people the storm had yet to hit. It let them know what they were in for,” Foster said.
The information on the Web site allows people to look at live information for the area and historical data from as far back as when the station was built. There are also lesson plans available that teachers can use in the classroom.
The organization is hoping to build more on that part of the project, Foster said.
The mesonet organization also allows for the National Weather Service to use data collected.
“It represents a partnership between us and the National Weather Service,” Foster said. “Funding was secured by (U.S. Sen.) Mitch McConnell through a $1.5 million federal earmark for the Kentucky Climate Center, part of Western’s Applied Research and Technology program. The data is retrieved here at Western, processed and made available and it also goes directly to the NWS.”
On Monday, the Barren County station should be online alongside the Adair, Breathitt, Bullitt, Caldwell, Calloway, Casey, Christian, Fayette, Franklin, Grayson, Hopkins, Jackson, Knox, Lincoln, Logan, Ohio, Owen, Rowan and Warren county stations.
