New Weather Stations
August 27th, 2010 at 7:17 pm by Bill Steffen under Bill's Blog, Weather
Storm Team 8 now has 3 new weather stations up and running. The first is at our studios at 120 College SE in Heritage Hill just east of downtown Grand Rapids. The second is in Hudsonville. This station covers the fastest growing area in West Michigan and will provide good data when storms are approaching the immediate Grand Rapids metro area. The third weather station is on the roof of the Bil-Mar Restaurant on the beach at Grand Haven. This station will show us the first winds gusts of strong storms coming off Lake Michigan, and it’ll be fun to see on those nasty days in fall and winter when the wind is howlin’. These stations update every few seconds so they’ll give us very current data. Now, we paid for these stations, but budgets are limited. We do have one more that will be going up in or near Kalamazoo soon. We’d like to see more of them. In many markets these stations are sponsored (check this link). If you have a business (or just any group) that might be interested in getting a weather station (with or without a camera) in exchange for logos on the web and/or a mention on the air, send me an email at bill.steffen@woodtv.com. I’d love to eventually get 20 or 30 of these all over West Michigan. The big plus here is the instantaneous data…not waiting until the top of the hour for new stats.
Bill will this be like the live web cam Grand Haven has?
How about personal weather stations? Mine is linked to Wunderground (KMIGOWEN2) but that can be changed.
I know of a site in the rockford area that one might be able to go.
Hopefull number 4 soon with Indy and Fixxer running it!!!!!! Can’t wait till see the lake shore store this winter….INDY!!!
lol
Bill … it looks like a ? I can’t remember the name of the manufacturer … of the weather station and its driving me nuts … Would you tell who makes the weather satation… I know it isn’t made by acu* rite or chaney instruments
Thanks, keith
I remember now is it a Davis Weather Station ?
BeeN trying to get Davis software programers to create very small gif’s for current data conditions to be able to HREF to a map. I.e. If the temp is 72 then it would generate a small 72 degree gif picture. Then for us that have many stations OR want to ref other stations on a map could just use that gif as a HREF on our map, and have that map update say every minute or 5 minutes/ what every we choose. Then map the same map for winds, dewpoints, …. What ever
They “Davis” currently already generate that only in a tall graph type format pic with the number at the bottom, now to just have them add this new small text looking gif.
Hey Bill, saw you walking at the back of the pack this morning at the Metro Cruise run. I was the guy running who looked like he hates running.
Tried to find you at the end buy I couldn’t. If you want to drop a weather station on my roof that would be great. Probably not the useful for you since I’m half way between your studio and the NWS, buy it would sure be fun for me.
saw grand rapids NWS fall outlook and also a little about the winter… saying the snowfall will start out slow but we will make up for it by middle of winter
I saw/read the write-up as well; and while i agree the majority of fall will favor abv avg. temps. i believe Nov. will feature a 1-2 week NEGATIVE departure that could certainly place LES prone areas in abv avg SNOWFALL..*
*speculative (obviously) and subject to change!!
Nice outlook. What leads you to believe that?
Rob:Forecast product based on 70% IRISH guts, 20% wx-life experience and instinct..and 10% sheer guesswork
Sorry, my tongue-n-cheek response was lacking in detail(which is hard to provide anyway almost 90 days out)due to sleep deprivation… pure speculation on my part, Rob.
It appears the reasons the GRR NWSFO was providing for a BELOW fall snfl expectation were based primarily(heavily weighted at least) on transition from winter Nino> summer Nina and composite analogs gleaned from those respective years meeting similar ENSO criteria….yet looking @ their snfl chart, i see that Muskegon received ABV(in absolute terms/#’s)avg snfl in 3/7 of the analog falls chosen.That,imo, leaves the door wide-open for LES areas using that method of forecasting, although i still believe that sample size is a problem(too small/few)to give an extremely confident probability outlook for it.I’m betting on at least 1 synoptic, and 1-2 LES events for Nov as i’m counting on at least a single visit from polar jet w/ amplified ‘Trans-Siberian Orchestral’ air(& fixxxer’s most feared nemesis) ~ but again that’s a speculative assumption/guess at this point, and i am very skeptical of anyone who speaks w/ extreme confidence about ANY scenario 60-90 days out!!
Bill, We have property in Newaygo near the intersection of M-82 and Cypress fairly open field on a hill. You could place a station there.
Fall Forecast For Southwest Lower Michigan
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=grr&storyid=57031&source=0
My FAVORITE part of all of that….
While I do not show the full seasonal snowfalls for those years (July 1 through June 30th of the next year), I do want to point out that Muskegon had well above normal snowfall for each of those seven full snow seasons. Grand Rapids had above normal snowfall in nearly all of those winters too, as did Lansing. So it seems while the snow season is likely to get off to a slow start during the fall part of the season, it will make up for it by mid winter across all of Southwest Lower Michigan.
NICE!
You could put one in Ravenna, and maybe one in Fruitport.
Can I have one here at my house? That would be neat. According to everything I have been reading and looking at, it looks like a mild early Fall. This will lead to a slow start to the winter snowfall, started first by a couple of LES events. Then we go toward a mild pattern in January. This will be followed by a much colder and snowy pattern for the end of Winter. Does that sound close?…nothing to base this on except impression and my own interpretation.
We shall see, right?
Do you guys have a station in Holland? I know someone does. Pretty sure it’s Storm Team 8.