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Spotlight Elwood’s Successful Weather Station By Gene Tranchino Director of Technology, Elwood UFSD
Last year our superintendent asked me to look into getting a weather station for our school district. I knew we would want a web enabled weather station that would provide live weather data to our district website. I also knew that I would want to get a weather station that is durable, would last for years to come and wouldn’t become a maintenance burden for our technology staff. After doing some research, I discovered what appeared to be the perfect product, the WeatherHawk weather station. This is a station that is built with industrial grade components, is wireless, and has all of the data logging capabilities that we wanted. The Elwood weather station is mounted on the roof of our middle school and wirelessly connects to a network attached computer below in the library. It does all of the things that you would expect from such a device; sensors for barometric pressure, wind direction and speed, temperature, rain collection, etc. It was easy to install, required no electric or network cabling and to date, we have had no need to go on the roof for maintenance. The weather station provides accurate local weather conditions for the Elwood community, but we wanted to incorporate the use of the weather station in our classrooms. The weather station webpage supports scientific inquiry with authentic real time data for our primary and intermediate grades supporting many items in their curriculum guide. At the middle school and high school level, we have installed the free WeatherHawk data logging network software which allows for advanced longitudinal data collection directly from the weather station to all of our science classrooms computers. Through our research into the weather station, we have learned about the GLOBE program. GLOBE is an international exchange of science knowledge across more than one hundred countries and is highly collaborative. The weather station we purchased is GLOBE compliant and we are working to register the Elwood school district as a GLOBE member. Western Suffolk BOCES worked with the manufacturer, WeatherHawk, to acquire this device through a 501 coser. Now our students are able to use the Elwood station to support scientific inquiry with authentic real time data.
Elwood Weather Station Website can be found at www.elwood.k12.ny.us. If you are interested in more information on WeatherHawk, please contact Carl Jeanniton [cjeannit@wsboces.org] at 631 595-6811, or Penny Notarnicola [pnotarni@wsboces.org] at 631 595-6831.
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