About the School-Based Weather Station Network
The School-Based Weather Station Network is being developed
by Andrew Weaver
and Ed Wiebe at
the University of Victoria. Undergraduate
students Michael Rempel, Stephen Sobie, Bill Bird, Natasha Ridenour,
and Lucas Kavanagh
have also made substantial software contributions.
It is a partnership with British Columbia school districts
61 (Victoria),
62 (Sooke),
63 (Saanich),
64 (Gulf Islands),
68 (Nanaimo),
69 (Qualicum),
70 (Alberni),
71 (Comox Valley),
79 (Cowichan Valley).
84 (Vancouver Island West).
Over the
years, funding for this project has been obtained from
the BC Year of Science,
the NSERC PromoScience
programme,
NEC Corporation, CTV Vancouver Island,
and generous donations from a number of individuals. In kind contributions have also been received from
Davis Instruments Corporation
and
ITT Visual Solutions.
The school-based weather stations, and teacher resources available on the
Resource Page, are being developed to assist teachers by providing them
with free resources that will allow them to deliver aspects of the K-12
science education curriculum with state of the art interactive technologies.
Our ultimate goal is to engage children in the wonders of science.
A brief overview of the project is also available.
Longitudes used on the site are planetocentric. That is, they increase positively eastward from the Prime Meridian. Under this system the longitude of Victoria is (approximately) 237° which is equivalent 123°W or -123°.
For further information or data inquiries please contact us at weather@ocean.seos.uvic.ca. If you find a problem or have a question about the site please be sure to send the relevant site and page address (the URL from your browser's address bar). Also include a screen capture image if you can so that we can see what you are seeing. If necessary you can reach us by telephone at 250-472-4006 but email will have a much faster response time.
We have granted the CTV Vancouver Island the exclusive rights to use the real time data in their live television weather segments in an effort to both promote public education in general in the Greater Victoria, Sooke and Saanich School Districts, as well as to build community relationships and partnerships with the local school districts and the local media.
Funding for purchasing the weather stations installed at the Highlands, East Highlands and West Highlands locations was provided by donations from the Highlands Stewardship Foundation and Longview Consulting.
This network uses Davis Vantage Pro 2 (calibration study) weather stations which are monitored automatically with our own version of VProWeather on computers running the GNU/Linux operating system. The data are recorded in a MySQL database and fed out to the world through the VictoriaWeather.ca web site. Figures are generated using scripts written in the IDL language. The IDL license was kindly donated by ITT Visual Information Solutions. PDF versions of the station summary pages are generated with LaTeX.
The first station was installed in February 2002 on the roof of the Ian Stewart Complex here at the University of Victoria.
