New Weather Station Online....

The weather station installed by Desert Research Institute (Western Regional Climate Center) is now online. We spent an afternoon going back and forth, and with Kevin Browne's help (NRS tech guy) you can now go to this link (click here) to see Hastings' latest weather. Roll your mouse over the variables (temp, relative humidity) and the values on the y-axis will change. There is also a link to archived data.

Finishing the Weather Station Install

Jaime del Valle installed a great fence to keep the pigs from tearing up the soil moisture and temperature sensors (wooden stakes) and from scratching against the tipping rain gauge (bucket on stand). And as you can see, it is raining again. Winter has returned; streams are flowing 100 times more than last week. Cold, wet days have replaced the dry days in the 70's. Next week we will reconfigure the firewall so this new station can go online.

CDF Samples Vegetation Moisture/Weather Station

Staff from the Monterey Cal Fire Forester's Office visited Hastings in what we expect will be a program of sampling vegetation for fuel moisture near our weather stations. Hopefully, this will allow them to correlate the fuel moisture sensor in the RAWS station with actual measurements of chaparral and Ceanothus in the field. Jaime del Valle worked with Jonathan Pangburn (Cal Fire) to set this up.

New Weather Station

Last week, David Simeral and Greg McCurdy from the Desert Research Institute (Reno) were here. We are cooperating in putting up a network of these

new weather stations across the NRS reserves. This was Hastings' turn. Jaime dug out what we thought was a huge hole for the main mast (3'x3'x3') and I helped with the three forms for cement for guy wires (2'x2'x2'). Craig Nowak helped us figure out some details. A mobile mix cement truck delivered the cement and Jaime and the younger set at Hastings finished. On Monday Jan 31, DRI crew installed the instruments. It just figures. That day the transmit side of our internet satellite failed. Anyway, we will soon be online with the rest of the UC Natural Reserve/DRI stations. (http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/weather/).