New State Mesonet List

[adlyons]

With the viral success of the Oklahoma mesonet, many states have followed suit with their own systems. I found a nice website from Cambell scientific with links to all the available state mesonets and their data. In total, this represents around 1700 realtime stations. Some useful ones for chasers will include

1. Oklahoma mesonet
2. Kansas mesonet
3. Nebraska mesonet
4. West Texas mesonet
5. Colorado Ag net

The websites differ in their quality and data coverage of course but overall I find the extra data to be quite useful. A lot of this data is ingested into mesowest and can be viewed on one plot. MesoWest Data Have any secret data sources you know about?

 

[GPhillips]

While the OK mesonet has pretty uniform equipment and siting requirements, others may not.

To expand on that, my experience was with the KS mesonet data. This was not put in as some grand uniform plan like the OK mesonet. It's a combination of various instrument types put in by different organizations over the years for various purposes. Looking at the data during weather events, the wind in particular was a problem. The height of the wind instrument varied on the platform, and most were not on 10 meter towers like the ASOS/AWOS/OK mesonet stations. So a significant wind event would go through with significant damage and wind gusts greater than 60 mph on ASOS/AWOS and one might see 45 mph from a mesonet site, for example, as a max wind on some of the platforms. Only some of the of the sites had 10 meter winds, and it wasn't always clear which wind was being plotted when looking at the output on various maps. A site might have a 10 meter wind sensor, but the map or listing for a website may only use the 2 meter wind.

So, I'm not saying the data is not useful, just that the quality will indeed vary, so use the output with caution.

 

[Jeff Duda]

Don't forget about the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. True that it doesn't have many dedicated stations and is really just a conglomeration of ASOS, AWOS, RWIS, SchoolNet etc. networks. But there are still helpful products and graphics relevant to chasers in (near-)real-time.

It's pretty nice that the core of Tornado Alley now has state mesonets! Certainly makes chasing decisions more complicated (but also more informed).

 

[adlyons]

Don't forget about the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. True that it doesn't have many dedicated stations and is really just a conglomeration of ASOS, AWOS, RWIS, SchoolNet etc. networks. But there are still helpful products and graphics relevant to chasers in (near-)real-time.

It's pretty nice that the core of Tornado Alley now has state mesonets! Certainly makes chasing decisions more complicated (but also more informed).

Great Point Jeff! IEM always has fantastic data and tools. I really should make it up there sometime.

 

[John Wetter]

Not exactly tornado alley, but Pennsylvania just launched their statewide mesonet as well, the Keystone Mesonet.

Keystone Mesonet

 

[Kevin Mahoney]

For northern plains folks, the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network (NDAWN) has pretty good coverage.

South Dakota has one as well, though not as dense. I actually haven't used SD's yet.