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Contact: Liz Carroll
Phone: 413/775-1420
E-mail: carroll@gcc.mass.edu

Media contact: Liz Carroll
Marketing & Publications
413/775-1420 | carroll@gcc.mass.edu

Release date: November 22, 2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New GCC weather station records our area's most complete data

With the installation last week of a new weather station funded by a grant from WMECO, students in Ted Johnson's Introduction to Meteorology class began utilizing a 24-hour stream of the most comprehensive weather data available in Franklin County. Mounted 30 feet in the air outside the East Building, the equipment measures rainfall, barometric pressure, temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, light intensity, ultraviolet A & B light, and much more. The unit continuously radios its information back to a computer in a base station set up in the science department office. Eventually, the data will be linked to the GCC web site so that anyone in the community can access it.

"In the past,” explains Johnson, Coordinator of the Engineering Program, "we had little hand-held devices that you would take outside and hold up. There was no accurate way of measuring rainfall, and since you couldn't get up in the air where the wind was blowing, you could never get accurate wind. We had no way of recording the data over time. This station monitors conditions 24 hours a day, so you don't have to run outside every minute to see what's going on. It allows us to get accurate measurements and get them over time so that you can look at weather patterns. My primary purpose in putting it up was to be able to show how all of the weather variables change when a front moves through and you get what's called air mass advection.”

The weather station also has very practical applications for anyone interested in sustainable energy, according to Teresa Jones, Adjunct Professor in the Science Department. Jones teaches a spring-semester course in sustainable energy. "We got an optional feature on the weather station which measures solar incidence—basically, sunlight intensity,” explains Jones. "So one of the things we'll be looking at is the intensity of sunlight over the course of the year. That's relevant for solar hot water installations and for solar photovoltaic electricity generation. There are internet sites where you can go and get the average solar incidence for Boston or for Albany, but now we'll actually get real data for Greenfield, Massachusetts.”

Coming soon is a windmill which will allow students to correlate wind data from the weather station with the amount of electricity being produced by the windmill. "This is information people want to know if they are thinking about putting one up at home or at work,” says Jones.

The value of the equipment plus software is approximately $1,000; it was configured by Ted Johnson, and installed with the help of GCC maintenance workers. "It's great that we have someone like Ted to put it all together,” says Jones. "The equipment is one thing, but making it work for students and the community is another. This is a great combination of expertise on campus and grant money from Western Massachusetts Electric Company.”