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Paul Zunkel, assistant professor of physical science, talks about the $18,000 weather station he has requested from the university Friday in the in the Science Hall. Zunkel said the current weather station’s problems outweighed the benefits.
Paul Zunkel, assistant professor of physical science, has recently put in a request for an $18,000 weather station.
ESU currently has a weather station on the roof of the Science Hall.
“There are a lot of issues with a roof-mounted station,” Zunkel said. “One of the issues we can have with weather stations that are mounted on a roof, is if they’re not calibrated and that calibrations not maintained, you can get some erroneous values and we want to try and avoid that as much as possible. They require a lot of maintenance.”
The data from the current station is a hassle to get ahold of, requiring a lot of IT work before they can work with it, according to Zunkel.
“My thoughts were that we should get something newer… something that can connect to the mezonenetworks,” Zunkel said. “These networks help get a finer picture of what’s going on around Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, what have you.”
The station would require a small area away from traffic, in a field somewhere, according to Zunkel.
“The goal is to get it as close to campus as possible so we can determine what’s going on at campus,” said Zunkel. “I’d like this to be associated with student research projects in the future, and we could do some nice climatological impact studies as to what an event, whether it be a cold front or heat wave, or even something pretty severe.”
According to Zunkel, professors were asked by the department of physical sciences to come up with ideas for requests and grant work. Zunkel suggested the station.
“I used the (current) station to demonstrate to students in my Meteorology and Climatology classes how parameters like temperature, humidity, pressure and wind direction change over short periods of time,” said Richard Sleezer, professor of climatology, in an email. “It was less than optimal because the old station saved data to a memory module. The modules had to be removed, the data downloaded to a computer and then some analysis done with a spreadsheet in order to get anything useful for students.”
According to Sleezer, Zunkel is working to get a much more automated system, one that has data that is easier to access and thus more useful.
“I’m pretty excited about it,” said Zunkel. “It’s enough to put Emporia on the map so to speak, something we’ve never been a part of with these networks.”
The request for the station will be approved or denied by the end of the current semester by Provost David Cordle and the Faculty Senate.