On April 15, an environmental geoscience major's long-awaited plan for a wireless weather station at Boston College became a reality. With the help of the geophysics department, Eric Sanderson, A&S '08, installed a wireless weather station on top of O'Neill Library in order to monitor seven crucial outdoor elements: temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, UV index, solar radiation, and rainfall. Its proponents say the new station is a huge leap forward in weather monitoring at BC, and that the long-term data it provides will be used in the classroom and for research purposes.
The project began this fall when Sanderson saw an old weather monitor sitting on a shelf in the geophysics department. He proposed that the department try to buy and install an updated station, and his professor, Amy Frappier, thought the project had enough promise to apply for an Academic Technology Innovation Grant (ATIG). BC can award up to $300,000 annually in ATIGs to encourage the use of technology in teaching and research. In December, the project was awarded the full $6,200 requested for the next three months. Sanderson worked on the logistics of the project to ensure the station would be up and running before he graduated.
"I knew our chances of getting the proposal approved were good because this was a unique project, and it's something that would be useful to facilities and students," Sanderson said.
Only a few feet high, the small black weather station is fastened to a metal tripod and bolted into three 60-pound cement blocks on the roof of O'Neill. Any observer standing in O'Neill plaza can see the station's anemometer, which measures wind speed and direction, peaking over the top of the library's roof. The station's seven hand-sized sensors run 24/7 and feed real-time data to a computer in the geophysics department, where Sanderson downloads and archives the data. The readings also feed to WeatherLink, an online weather Web site, where users can access the data.
While many students already use online monitors like the Weather Channel's weather.com or Agora Portal's wx.com to find out about the weather, Sanderson says the new BC station has its own unique benefits.
"It can't predict the temperature days in advance, but it can predict general trends. The data is updated constantly, every minute. Temperature readings are in real time and especially suited to the area surrounding BC."
Sanderson said that Boston-based weather monitors can have significantly different temperature readings due to their proximity to the water and city atmosphere. For this reason, a campus-based monitor is much more accurate for reading and predicting BC temperatures.
The data from the new station is not currently available on an official BC Web site, but Sanderson said he hopes that in the next phase of the project the information captured by the weather station will be made readily available to students and members of the BC community.
"This project is just starting, but my vision is that all the data would be made easily accessible to students through Agora and BC Info, so whenever people log in, they have access to it. Eventually, I'd like to have a sidebar in the Portal that provides potential warnings about rainfall, temperature, and UV index," Sanderson said.
Many students at BC acknowledge the need for a more accurate weather tool and say they would use the data if it were to be made available.
"I end up using weather.com a lot, but I find I get outside and the temperature is totally different than what I thought it would be. If there was a real-time weather system at BC, I would definitely use it," said Ryan Mossman, A&S '09.
Besides its obvious benefits to students with more accurate campus weather readings, the new weather station will also be useful to facilities members and faculty members like Kenneth Galli, professor in the geophysics department, who worked with Sanderson on the project. Sanderson said that professors will be able to use the data in ongoing research projects that require daily weather logs, as well as in courses like the natural sciences core Weather, Climate, and Environment. Facilities management will also be interested in using the data to deal with rainfall and flooding issues on campus, Sanderson said.
The next immediate step in the project will be to install two flat-panel, 46-inch-screen televisions on the second floor of Devlin Hall. Beginning this summer, the televisions will broadcast geophysical data as well as real-time weather data with graphics and charts to match the readings.
In the fall, Sanderson will continue his studies at UMass Lowell where he will be pursuing his master's degree in atmospheric science. He said he hopes that one day he will deliver the weather for a newspaper or on network television, but for right now, he is just happy that he has left behind a project that will be of great use to the BC local and scientific community.
"It's honestly amazing that it was able to be put up this semester. It moved along much more quickly than we expected," he said.
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