The Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) has a weather station! The station is located on the roof of the Center’s Hiebert Marine Laboratory in Provincetown, and has recently been made public on the Center for Coastal Studies website.
The system was purchased with donations to the CCS ‘Fund-a-Need’ online auction and installed on the roof of the Center’s Marine Lab in March 2021 by Jerry Evans of Chatham Wind and Time and CCS Interdisciplinary Research Coordinator Owen Nichols.
The weather station, a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro 2, records a variety of weather parameters including temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and humidity, and is equipped with a cooling fan for accurate air temperature measurements without the influence of heat reflected from the lab roof.
The weather station is connected to the Center for Coastal Studies server and archives data collected every 30 minutes in addition to sharing real-time data to other users via the WeatherLink network. Archived data are being used by CCS scientists in their research and are available for use by students, educators, researchers and interested members of the public.
The Center dedicates our weather station in memory of long-serving CCS staff member and volunteer Charlie Westcott. Said Nichols: “Staff who have been at CCS for a while remember that among the tasks he performed dutifully and rigorously, he routinely replaced the paper data tape from the old National Weather Service (NWS) cooperative observation system weather station at the Provincetown Coast Guard station and mailed the completed ones to the NWS facility in Taunton. At CCS, we strive to be as steadfast and vigilant as Charlie as we monitor the changing ecosystems around us.”
Photo: Jerry Evans of Chatham Wind and Time installs weather station on roof of the Center for Coastal Studies’ Hiebert Marine Laboratory in Provincetown.
