Early May, we had a new addition to our hard-working volunteer force tending and cajoling and coaxing our MCA Community Garden to bloom and produce green gifts. It looks a little like R2-D2 on a crash diet but has a more focused function than ensuring universal peace for all.
Let us introduce you to Monty. It is about 3 m tall and consists of a hail sensor and an all-in-one weather station that measures temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speed/direction, and rainfall. Monty is fully autonomous (i.e., solar powered), and its important data is shared over a cellular network.
The Northern Hail Project, which is part of the Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory out of Western University (https://uwo.ca/nhp/), was deployed in 2023 with 18 stations and continues to grow (20 now!). This network forms part of an initiative to understand the incidence of hail in Calgary, identify vulnerable areas, and ultimately make us more resilient against the dark and evil forces of damaging hail. Monty’s smart cookie grandfather is Dr. Connell Miller who is the Director of the Northern Mesonet Project.
Monty likes to chatter. Kinda dry, a one-track mind, yet rather interesting too. The data from the stations are posted every ten minutes in near real time at https://meso.cssl.ca/. Zoom in to Calgary to see similar stations across the city. You can click on any station and the data for user-selectable variables can be plotted. Archived data can now be downloaded. It will be upgraded to a five-minute update soon. You can read more about the network at https://www.uwo.ca/nmp/index.html.
If you don’t want to zoom in to our community’s location every time, you can zoom in to a desired field of view and then select the icon on the far top right. Clicking that will create a unique web address that you can bookmark to navigate directly to the selected view. Our station is labelled “Montgomery”.
The station should help with our frost seasons. Light winds, clear skies, and dewpoints near (or below) 0°C the afternoon or evening before usually mean frost is likely.
We are excited to see what Monty will share with us! Many thanks go to Dr. Julian C. Brimelow, who is the Director of the Northern Hail Project.
Click here to the Montgomery Community News home page for the latest Montgomery community updates.
