On a farm in rural Clark County in southwest Ohio, fallow fields stretch as far as the eye can see. In the middle of them, there’s a 35-foot tower.
“You're looking at one of [Ohio’s] first mesonet stations,” said Aaron Wilson, the state climatologist of Ohio and an ag weather and climate field specialist with Ohio State University Extension.
He and mesonet manager Jim DeGrand explained how the high-tech device captures detailed local weather conditions.
“So way up there at the top is our top measurement level at 10 meters,” DeGrand said. “We're measuring wind speed and direction. We're measuring solar radiation. We're measuring temperature and humidity up there.”
They’re taking those same measurements, plus some, closer to the ground too.
“This one, right here, that's measuring leaf wetness,” DeGrand said.
Nearby, there’s a giant precipitation gauge and underground, sensors monitor soil temperature and water content.
All of this information is really helpful to people like farmers and atmospheric scientists. But in Ohio, it’s currently not being monitored very consistently, which means less accurate information both for the state’s biggest industry – agriculture – and for all of Ohio during severe weather.
Wilson and DeGrand hope a network of new mesonet stations will change that.
Ohio’s weather gap
There are weather stations all over the state, DeGrand says.
“The National Weather Service has stations. There are automated weather stations at airports around the state. And then individuals have little standalone stations on their farms or in their backyards,” he said.
But they’re not as advanced as Clark County’s new mesonet station and the information they collect isn’t always standardized.
Plus, there’s another issue.
“The number of observers over time has decreased,” Wilson said. “And generally in Ohio, we've got areas of gaps in those observations — northwest Ohio, southeast Ohio. And these also coincide with radar gaps.”
Detailed information from mesonet stations can fill in those gaps. But Ohio doesn’t have very many; most of the nine were built within the last year.
For comparison, Kentucky and Wisconsin both have about 80 mesonet stations, giving them a dense network of on-the-ground weather conditions.
How the Ohio Mesonet can help
For farmers like Joe Davlin, who manages Ohio State’s Western Agricultural Research Station, information gathered from mesonet stations will help him determine when he’ll apply herbicides or plant seeds.
“In the springtime, we're always monitoring soil temperature because you don't want to plant until it gets about 50 degrees,” he said. “So with that soil temperature gauge in the ground, we can watch that.”
That real-time information is all the more helpful given the changing climate, Wilson says.
“In Ohio, we deal with rapid oscillations between extremely wet and extremely dry. That I think is what our farmers are really hard pressed to manage,” he said. “We had the eighth wettest April through July on record in Ohio and the driest August over the last 131 years.”
But the information gathered by mesonet stations is useful for people who aren’t farmers too.
“The National Weather Service offices utilize this information to improve forecasting, especially during severe weather,” Wilson said.
Last year, for example, the National Weather Service used mesonet data to issue tornado watches and warnings in Wisconsin.
“You think about the train derailment in eastern Ohio, in East Palestine. A denser network could have provided opportunities to understand potential movement of those hazardous materials,” he said.
At the end of the day, mesonet technician Geddy Davis, who works with Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, says weather affects everyone from emergency managers to construction workers to everyday people trying to have a safe commute.
“The state has a very storied weather history, and we know that that history is still continuing to be written,” he said. “So how can we be prepared for what's coming next? A system like this is very important for that.”
With more time and funding, he’s hoping all of Ohio’s 88 counties will someday have a mesonet station of their own.
