IWN Piece on TUCSON Automated Weather Stations

Sponge Bob

This is now passworded meaning one must register with IWN to view the piece ...unlike a few montha ago. It was written by David Fitzgerald of Met É

As google cache has it for now I will repost here before it disappears from the Google Cache If you wanna know more go register with IWN , costs nothing.

Source ( for a short while) This article is from 2003.

TUCSON = The Unified Climatological and Synoptic Observational Network. These stations are generally located in Climate and Marine Reseach stations run by 3rd Level Institutes along the Coast or in Ag Research stations inland. Some TUCSON units have replaced synoptic stations run inhouse by Met Éireann as confidence in data quality grew and as broadband slowly appeared in rural Ireland.

Stratoq on IWN wrote:

I came across this article from the Irish Scientist Magazine 2003 on the TUCSON stations that are now employed at many stations across the synoptic network. The article is a bit old now (many more have been added eg at Ballyhaise, Fermoy,Oak Park, Malin, Markree Sligo, Mount Dillon Roscommon, Newport Mayo, Sherkin, Gurteen) but ASFAIK the technology is much the same.

The TUCSON Automatic Weather Station
By David Fitzgerald (Met Éireann)

The TUCSON Automatic Weather Station had its origins in an initiative to automate Met Éireann's climatological observation network. Rather than purchase one of the many automatic stations available on the market, Met Éireann designed, developed, tested and installed a completely new system to meet its own specific requirements.

Some years ago, Met Éireann decided to develop an automatic weather station (AWS) which would be capable of carrying out both synoptic and climatological weather observations. Synoptic observations are detailed, real-time measurements of air pressure, wind speed and direction, temperature, dew point etc., needed for immediate analysis and forecasting of the current weather situation. Climatological observations focus on a smaller number of weather elements - typically rainfall and temperature - and serve mainly to describe local weather patterns and their variation over longer time periods.

Currently, Met Éireann maintains a network of 16 synoptic weather stations and approximately 80 climate stations. While the synoptic network is a mix of manual and automatic stations, the climatological network is almost entirely manual. In developing the new automatic station, Met Éireann aimed to enhance the quality and quantity of observations from both networks. To reflect its dual synoptic and climatological application, the development project was named TUCSON - The Unified Climate and Synoptic Observation Network.

The TUCSON logger installed at Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. The anemometer (wind meter) mast rises behind the logger. Pyrometers (solar radiation measurements) are mounted on an arm extending backwards from the mast.

One of TUCSON's principal advantages was that all aspects of design and development were within Met Éireann's own control, so enabling the system to exactly match local requirements and conditions. The first step entailed drawing up a detailed specification, following which the project team decided to base TUCSON on a Campbell scientific CR23X logger with a storage capacity of 4 Mbytes. Intensive work followed on data collection and software development. In programming the logger, a balance had to be struck between ensuring all sensors were sampled at the correct rate, checking that all secondary processing was competed before sampling recommenced, and optimising the usage of the logger's storage.

By mid-2002, a prototype system had been developed and was ready for field testing. A fully-functional TUCSON AWS was installed at Met Éireann's weather station at Mullingar, and has operated very reliably - no data have been lost and the TUCSON measurements have correlated well with the official Mullingar readings.

The list of weather elements which can be measured by TUCSON includes atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, precipitation amount, air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, grass minimum temperature and a range of soil and earth temperatures. The sensors which measure these elements are wired to the data logger, which is programmed using Campbell Scientific's EDLOG software.

Most sensors in the TUCSON system are duplicated, providing resilience and also a means of data quality control. Once measured, data are processed on the local logger. A modem connection provides for the automatic transmission of data to Met Éireann's communications centre in Dublin. There they are further quality controlled and formatted for use in the operational forecast offices, for onward international circulation and for archiving in the climate databases.

At present there are TUCSON stations installed at four locations - Mullingar, Co. Westmeath; Phoenix Park, Dublin; Mace Head, Co. Galway; and Johnstown Castle, Co. Wexford.

It is planned to install approximately 25 additional stations over the coming five years. This will represent a very substantial enhancement of Met Éireann's observational network, and provide an invaluable data resource for operational weather forecasting, climate and environmental monitoring, and the development of customised services for specialised applications - for example, in the agricultural sector.

EDIT

This piece from the Sherkin Island Marine Station on 'their' Tuscon will survive online even if Google Cache expires.

http://www.sherkinmarine.ie/SherkinComment38.pdf

Shows the installation process for the myriad sensors. A TUCSON is is not a trivial piece of kit