The newly-renovated Boyd Science Center has been up and running for over a year. One of the buildings most distinguishing features is the jagged profile of expensive-looking equipment crowning the Judd Gregg Meteorological Institute. I spoke with Dr. Eric Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Meteorology, to get an inside glance at what actually happens on the roof of Plymouth State’s newest building. Stepping out onto the sun-blasted roof, the first thing one notices is how close the sky appears to be. High above the noise and shelter of the town below, intense wind pours up and over the walls, washing across the clean, rubber surface. A large satellite dish angled towards Pleasant St. receives up-to-the-minute weather data from the National Center for Environmental Prediction in Washington, DC and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The collected data is sent through the roof down to a server that broadcasts the information to the largest electronic map wall of any university in the country. Thirty-two nineteen inch flat screens and two forty-two inch plasma screens display everything from lightning strikes across the country to weather balloon launch sites for the day. Simulations of the future state of the atmosphere predicts the national weather up to six days in advance. One screen, focused on the Gulf of Mexico, showed the remnants of hurricane Ivan spinning out into a glorified rain cloud. Beside the satellite dish is a tall, skinny Global Positioning System (GPS) tower. The GPS network works on a channel that is attenuated, or diminished, by the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. One can effectively measure the degree of attenuation and determine the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere between the instrument and the satellite. This setup is one of roughly forty in the country, and was one of the first to be fully operational. Across from the satellite and GPS tower are the Davis Automated Weather Station and a simple raised box, made of whitewashed wooden slats. The wooden box is a standard instrument shelter; it houses a maximum and minimum thermometer and a standard micro barograph, which is a recording barometer. Beside the instrument shelter sits what appears to be a large, steel bucket. It is, in fact, a precipitation gauge, which is used to record inches of rainfall. Instruments such as these have been used for many years, and seem out of place amidst their state-of-the-art neighbors. They are, however, still implemental when measuring weather conditions, and will probably be used for many years to come. The Davis Automated Weather Station contains instruments to record temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, and precipitation. This is the source of the hourly weather updates on the Plymouth website. A new addition to the Boyd roof family is a portable surface weather station that can do everything the Davis can do, but is small enough to fit in the back of a van. It uses solar power and has a cell phone component to send back information from the field. Meteorology students also have access to a portable weather balloon launcher, which is vital when gathering upper-atmospheric data.
Over the summer, with the aid of a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, three meteorology faculty members and six undergraduate students set up a full-time weather forecasting operation that supported a huge field project measuring the atmospheric chemistry and air pollution of New England. There was a ship in the Gulf of Maine, four airplanes, and a panoply of land-based instruments spread across New England up to Nova Scotia measuring atmospheric chemistry and meteorological conditions. This field project went on for several weeks, and the forecasts were used to support decisions about where the airplanes should fly, where the ship should go, and what kind of track should be run to gather the best atmospheric samples. Hoffman said, “Our forecasts were useful to the hundreds of scientists that were here over the past summer.”We are also in the beginning phase of another project with NOAA and the New Hampshire Department of Transportation. Our goal is to set up road weather stations across the state so that the Department of Transportation can have accurate information on where to dispatch plows and sanding trucks during a storm. This is an estimated three year project, with roughly twenty such road weather stations. One is already set up in Portsmouth. Dr. Hoffman and a student are currently working with the Public Service of New Hampshire, or PSNH, to discover a correlation between specific types of weather and power outages. By looking at weather that has caused black-outs in the past, it may be possible for PSNH to anticipate power outages and get power running back to communities much quicker than is presently possible. In the future, keep your eyes peeled for a masters program in meteorology, which may be offered as early as next fall. Be sure to visit the Meteorology program’s website at http://vortex.plymouth.edu/ for information regarding the equipment talked about in this article, as well as up-to-date weather information from all across the country.