As Vermont sees more volatile and sometimes dangerous weather due to climate change, scientists at the University of Vermont are looking for ways to make forecasting more accurate.
Researchers and public officials hope a nascent network of weather stations will send scientists data from across the state in real time, making it easier to keep residents informed about extreme rainfall and flooding, but also when to plant their crops.
“There’s economic stakes and then there are also the stakes of human lives that are on the line,” said Joshua Beneš, with the University of Vermont’s Water Resources Institute.
UVM unveiled the first station in the Vermont Mesonet network Tuesday at the Caledonia County Fairgrounds in Lyndonville.
At 30 feet tall, the new tower is outfitted with sensors to detect wind speed and direction, multiple thermometers, a snow depth sensor and a rain gauge, among other instruments. Together, they’ll take measurements every five minutes of things like wind speed, soil saturation and relative humidity.
That data will be available to the public and to researchers online, but also to forecasters at the National Weather Service and emergency managers.
Beneš says realtime data from New York’s Mesonet network has shortened the state’s response time to floods, allowing emergency managers to station swift-water teams in places seeing the worst damage.
“It has allowed businesses to be able to move their inventory, you know, from low lying zones, and be able to get it up to places where it's not going to be flooded,” he said.
Vermont is one of just 12 states that don’t currently have a network like this. Right now, the National Weather Service extrapolates predictions from its sole weather station in Colchester.
Gabe Langbauer with the National Weather Service in Burlington says Vermont’s accordion-shaped topography makes it difficult for radar to reach much of the state, and that leaves a lot of data gaps for meteorologists.
“The Northeast Kingdom here is one of the most radar-blocked areas in the nation, so the live data coming in through the radar isn’t necessarily very reliable out here,” Langbauer said.
Those gaps can have life-threatening consequences during a flood or ice storm, and the hope with Mesonet is to provide better, more accurate forecasts about the weather.
The towers cost about $70,000 each to build and more to maintain. The University of Vermont has secured funding to build two of them — the one in Lyndonville being the first.
The Water Resources Institute is looking for more sites to host towers like the one at the fairgrounds, with a goal of roughly 20 such stations across the state.
Beneš says he hopes the network will be useful for Vermonters in the future, too.
“Hopefully this network is going strong 30 years from now, and we're able to look at these long-term trends and better understand how the climate is changing across the state,” he said.
Scientists and state officials cut a ribbon to open the station Tuesday just as a thunderstorm rolled in.
