New Weather Station

For decades, the BYU Physics and Astronomy Department has hosted a weather station on the roof of the ESC. Bryan Peterson was the station’s mastermind, carefully interpreting input data from a variety of sensors, conditioning analog and digital signals to record temperature, humidity, pressure, cloud cover, rainfall, and wind speed and direction. In fact, Bryan’s weather station detected a seismoacoustic wave generated by a volcano in Tonga in 2022, an atmospheric disturbance that started half a world away (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo7063).

Last year, the department upgraded the station. The new station has all the sensors integrated into a single unit, and it reports all the data digitally, through a convenient web interface. Students Matthew Schlitters and Ben Farley helped faculty members Michael Ware and Scott Bergeson replace the hardware. They climbed onto the ESC roof, scaled the weather station tower, retired the old sensors, and installed the new station. Current and recent weather is available on the department web page and at https://physics.byu.edu/department/weather. Archival data is still available, although it will take a little more time to make it downloadable to the general public.


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