(Louis Gentile) wrote in message . com...
"Meteorologically Disturbed" wrote in message news:liV5d.125744$D%.14979@attbi_s51...
Lou,

While nicely written, Blue Hill's plea for help compares apples to oranges
and overlooks several key facts. Firstly, your home "Davis" or whatever
other station doesn't require much in the way of voltage and can survive
many hours on batteries. The AWOS/ASOS network contains an integrated
network of sensors and electronics, including several high voltage
instruments (ceilometer for one), and most definitely cannot operate on
battery backup. The exception of this is the barometer which is a standalone
unit. Secondly, these surface observations don't forget are owned now by the
FAA and are first and foremost for aviation use. If the airport itself is
closed to traffic, then in all likelihood there's no reason to maintain the
system during a failure.

However, what's most likely the case is that many of the ASOS/AWOS were up
and running and logging data internally just fine, but their dial out
connectivity was severred. The same would apply to your home weather
station. If you're running on battery power but have no way to transmit your
observation, then the same problem applies.

As for lightning, almost all of these stations DO have lightning sensors. A
check of NLDN data across Florida showed no thunderstorm activity associated
with the landfall of Jeanne. Given it's tropical nature, nighttime landfall,
overall weak appearance, and lack of sustained 50 dBZ echoes, I wouldn't
have expected lighthning anyways. The only thunderstorms I saw were
yesterday afternoon just offshore of West Palm, more due to afternoon
heating than anything. These were included in the PBI observations.




"Louis Gentile" wrote in message
m...
discussion.txt
Address:http://www.bluehill.org/discussion.txt Changed:2:43 PM on
Friday, September 24, 2004

The site above is a reminder of the observations of yester-year when a
much better description of weather was regularly available through the
surface observations and the greatest care was taken to avoid the most
trivial mistake. There were instances of updated forecasts due to data
that the trained observer recorded that is not easily detected by
satellite. I checked for observations from central and coastal Florida
over the past 48 hours. No on site lightning detectors at the sites I
checked. Equipment failure before wind gusts reach 60KT. My home
weather station can do better than that and it runs for thirty hours
after power failure - on triple A cells. Power blackouts - with no
back-up generator. How much does it cost to repair or install a
lightning detector? Is our government's debt so severe that we cannot
even afford a workable system and have fallen behind some other
nation's observation systems as a result? In the lower 48, plus
Alaska, I have to go ten, twenty, and thirty years back into the
logbooks in order to retrieve accurate and detailed surface
observations, especially when studying events related to thunderstorm
activity, nor'easters, blizzards and tropical cyclones.

Regards,
Lou


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Just would like to add one comment. Back in my days the power
interruption usually did not result in a total communications failure.
The phones still worked.

A very good point. Of course this isn't always the case with
hurricanes, where the phones can fail due to such widespread network
damage.

At the same time, an ASOS/AWOS which is only connected by one data
line can fail if that one line fails. I am not familiar enough with
ASOS/AWOS communications and connections to readily comment on it any
more than that.

=====
Raymond C. Martin, Jr.
Associate Meteorologist, AccuWeather Inc.- http://www.accuweather.com/
New Jersey Expressways and Tollways - http://www.njfreeways.com/
Ray's Winter Storm Archive - http://www.njfreeways.com/weather/


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