Hampshire College Weather Station
http://hampshire.edu/~srNS/hc_weather.html
Managed by steve Roof, School of Natural Science (sroof@hampshire.edu)
The Hampshire weather station was installed in December 2000 and has been running continuously since Jan 1 2001. The weather station is set up in the farm fields north of the Greenwhich parking lots, several hundred meters from the nearest buildings and tall trees (Lat 42 degrees 19 minutes 23 seconds North, Long 72 degrees 31 minutes 54 seconds West).
The station consists of a 3 meter tall tower wwith electronics manufactured by Campbell Scientific, Inc. The datalogger is a CR10X. Various instruments on the station are used to collect the following data:
* Air temperature
* Wind direction
* Wind speed
* Humidity (absolute and relative)
* Barometric pressure
* Precipitation (tipping rain bucket with heater during freezing weather)
* Solar intensity
* Soil temperature (3 depths - a = 10cm deep, b = 50 cm, c = 90cm deep)
* Snow Depth (meters)
Instruments are read continuously and averages, minimums, and maxmimums are automatically calculated and stored after 10 minutes, 60 minutes, and after 24 hours. The datalogger creates four files: 101 - 10 minute data, 102 - 60 minute data, 103 - 24 hour data, 104 - instrument diagnostic data. Data are supposed to be available online at weather.hampshire.edu, although our link is not working as of Feb 2008.
Weather data is organized in Excel spreadsheets, one spreadsheet for each calendar year. Each Excel workbook contains 4 sheets, one each for the 101, 102, 103, and 104 data. Each row contains data for a particular time, each column contains either date/time or a sensor value. ALL TIMES ARE EASTERN STANDARD TIME - the time is NOT adusted for daylight savings time.
Our rainbucket has some problems. Frequently the orfice in the bucket gets clogged and the water drains very slowly, sometimes over the course of several days after a rain event. Compared with precipitation measurements at Amherst College, our rain gauge measures about 10-15% less total accumulation.
Snow Depth is measured as the distance between the sensor and the ground or snow surface. You need to look for the CHANGE in distance from the beginning to the ending time of you choice (e.g. start of snowstorm time to end of stom time). The snow depth sensor seems to frequently record aberrant values. You will need to filter these out!
Please direct any questions to Steve Roof, Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Science, School of Natural Science, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002 sroof@hampshire.edu, (413) 559-5667
2001 weather data