Mesoterps: A Univ. Micronet for Environmental Monitoring and Community Safety

The University of Maryland (UMD), a large public university located in College Park, Maryland, has experienced numerous severe weather events which have caused loss of life and significant damage to infrastructure. In response, students in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences are deploying a dense network of observational stations, known as a micronet, to monitor weather, microclimate, and environmental conditions across campus. By providing access to real-time weather conditions, such as rain rate and high-wind events, UMD students and faculty can stay safe and informed about changing conditions across campus. Our goal is to develop a micronet that is 1) automated, 2) calibrated, and 3) accessible to the UMD community.

As of August 2023, we have successfully deployed three observational stations across the UMD campus. Stations record data of temperature, dewpoint, pressure, wind speed and direction, and rain rate every minute using Davis Vantage Pro2 stations. Stations are fully automated, with the maximum cumulative time offline being 7 days over a 108 day logging period. Each station utilizes a Raspberry PI running WeeWX, an open source weather data collection software. All observational data are publicly accessible through our website, weather.umd.edu, and include interactive graphics on current weather conditions and hazards. This presentation will describe the development of our campus micronet, including the choice of observational locations, early results, and the challenges we have faced in deployment. In the future, we hope to implement particulate matter sensors and an automated alert system based on collected data.