CHESTERTOWN — The Kent County Office of Emergency Services has partnered with the University of Maryland, the Maryland Department of Emergency Management, the Maryland Environmental Service and the Maryland Department of Health to use a newly activated Maryland Mesonet weather monitoring station on the grounds of Kent County Behavioral Health’s Whitsitt Center.
The weather station located off Scheeler Road provides real-time, live weather data. See https://mesonet.umd.edu.
In meteorology, “mesoscale” refers to weather events that range in size from 1 to 150 miles in horizontal scale, lasting from several minutes to several hours (for example, thunderstorms, wind gusts, heat bursts).
Mesoscale weather events can go undetected without densely spaced meteorological networks; i.e., they’re often too small scale and high frequency to be detected by the conventional synoptic observing systems.
A mesonet is an observing network built specifically to resolve and monitor mesoscale phenomena.
According to a news release from Kent County Economic and Tourism Development, the Chestertown station is one of more than 70 planned stations across Maryland.
Kent County OES will use information and data from the station to forecast weather events “allowing probable advance notification of adverse weather conditions,” the news release states.
The stations, spaced 10 miles apart, are equipped to sample and transmit collected data within one minute.
Each mesonet site will measure air temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, rainfall, snow depth, and soil moisture and temperature at five depths — most at 1-minute intervals.
The measurements are sent to data servers at the University of Maryland using cellular transmission.
The automatic quality-controlled observations are transmitted in near real time to the National Weather Service and simultaneously available to emergency management personnel and Maryland citizens from the Mesonet website.
The Maryland Mesonet’s mission is to design, build and operate a network of high-quality, closely spaced, rapid-sampling weather monitoring and data collection systems across the state to advance emergency preparedness, the accuracy of regional weather forecasts, and expedite disaster assessment and recovery.
The news release states, “These stations will support local decision-making, quantify impacts on critical infrastructure from natural hazards, enhance public safety planning and identify long-term community risk and the data can be leveraged when requesting Presidential Disaster Declarations and Hazard Mitigation funding.”
Other data-driven applications include agriculture, education, utilities, green energy, environment, forest/wildfire management, transportation and tourism.