The Florida mesonet continues to evolve as a multi-agency entity combining the talents and expertise of many cooperating entities. The latest addition to the mesonet is the provision of new automated weather stations at State of Florida Extension offices and 4-H camps. This aspect is informed by our previous experiences with providing schools with automated weather stations both in the GLOBE program and in our own REALM projects at FSU.

In this new project, the University of Florida Extension offices received funding to help build weather awareness into an emergency management/disaster mitigation project. We provided weather stations and training to Extension service and 4-H personnel, and they have begun to utilize these weather stations in very creative ways. Further, their reporting to NOAA and back to FSU (via the Citizen Weather Observer Program interface to NOAA's MADIS network, and APRS), has been generally much more reliable than previous networks that have been principally located at schools.

We explore some of the reasons for the relative success of this new approach, which includes the versatile uses with which extension offices are using the real-time and archived data, and also provide some overview of the importance of siting of instrumentation and quality-control, and how this informs our research on mesonet applications using relatively inexpensive automated weather stations in an operational setting.