Hi. Now we're going to take a look at how we measure the numerous variables we've already talked about, you've already learned about that, are all components of the weather and climate system. We're going to start here with just a very busy slide which shows you how weird in general monitor this and it's really amazing how it has evolved from stations that just used to measure variables at the surface of the Earth, maybe on the ship out in the ocean. Now, there are still real important today. But with the advent of satellites in the 1960s and particularly when we got into the '70s and '80s, they discovered the Earth much more completely, much more frequently than we ever saw before. We have to pay homage, if you will, to polar orbiting satellites to go from pole to pole multiple times a day. They give us a real high resolution look and particularly up at the higher latitudes and geostationary satellites, which sit over the equator that don't see up to the poles, but can every few minutes look at the weather and climate all across a portion of the Western Hemisphere, Eastern Hemisphere covering the whole globe very often. There is your satellites, but we can't forget aircraft that are so important in learning more about our atmosphere. Hurricane hunters, for instance, going in there, but just planes flying in measuring winds aloft and temperatures aloft and such. We put balloons up through the atmosphere multiple times a day at various sites around the Earth and they measure a vertical profile of the atmosphere, barometric pressure, and winds, and temperature. Then we have a number of stations sitting at the surface of the Earth. Be at radar that's looking out side to side at precipitation or a buoy out at sea that's measuring temperatures and waves at the surface of the ocean and some even have sensors that go down below the ocean surface and measure the ocean at great depths, temperature, sometimes salinity. Then we have stations on ships that send data as they traverse the oceans. Then we have a number of land based operating systems which measure a wealth of different variables. A very noisy slide that shows you we're looking at the environment from all directions more so today than ever before. This is our instrumental record. Now, this is the old workhorse. We wouldn't know about the climate of the United States today without this co-operative whether observing network that essentially got into business in the 1890s. There were some older forts and scattered observations, but in the mid 1890s, you began to see this co-operative weather stations emerge around the country. Thousands of them that measure temperature inside these white louvered structures, as you see in the left and second from the left. A rain gauge, you see the first one from the left, you can see there between the two temperature shelters, measures rain. They send signals into recorders that will record this information. Daily volunteer observers, for the most part, go out and record the daily high temperature, low temperature, precipitation that fell and this has been done for well over a century and there are a number of stations around New Jersey that have records going back many decades, some over a century that have helped us learn more about the weather and climate of our state. Then in the last several decades, the state climate office has started up a network of weather stations around the state, literally from high point monument to West Cape May, where every five-minutes data are being gathered and recorded on a number of different weather variables. These are pictures of two of the stations in the network. One on a tripod measuring wind at about three meters over the ground on the lower left and one on a 10-meter tower, where wind is measured at the top, and you can see equipment attached to the tower below and a rain gauge off to the right there at the Columbus Rutgers, New Jersey Weather Network Station. But notice all the variables measured at some or all of the stations, all, of course, measure temperature, wind, precipitation, many with barometric pressure, dew point, and relative humidity. A lot have incoming solar radiation being measured, and a hand scattering of them measure snow depth. With what we call an acoustic sensor and soil temperature and water content at multiple levels below the Earth's surface. They're powered by the Sun, so we don't have to worry about power outages knocking them off. They communicate every five-minutes via cellular communication with data sent to the Cloud and, of course, they have the ability to add more instruments on them, which can make it awfully interesting to measure other environmental variables. Each station has its own particular web page where you get current conditions of view of the last 24 hours and a weather forecast. A weather forecasts produced by the National Weather Service, not the state climate office which operates this network, rather, Noaa National Weather Service Forecast along and I might add that the data gathered at these stations is fed every five-minutes to the National Weather Service, local offices, and also as input into their forecasts models on a national scale. There are a number of these mezzo nets around the nation that do that to make for higher resolution, better forecast in time and space than we've ever had before. This is a map showing you the distribution of the stations. You may wonder, there are not quite on this map, but there are now 66 of these stations in New Jersey and you may say, why do we need so many in New Jersey? Well, this map gives you an idea of why you have a sea breeze along the coast here in March and the temperatures in the low 40s and 50s along the coast, the low 40s up in the hills of Northwest Jersey but the sun is shining and it's much warmer in the southern part of the state where temperatures are nearing 80 degrees on this very warm March day for those locations. A 40 degree range in temperature across our state that very minute that these data were recorded. It does pay to have a number of these stations out there to give you this hyper-local view of weather and ultimately putting all this together they become climate records which are going to be very valuable as we go through the years and decades ahead. There's also a network of precipitation observers across New Jersey that dates back 2008. It's known as CoCoRaHS and you can see it all spelled out there in the top name. You may be interested in participating in this, or schools may be interested in participating in this. Its citizens signs. Daily observations made from a standard rain gauge which cause under $40 there on the left you'd get a ruler. There's all written and cartoons even that instruct you how you make these measurements. You go and enter them on a daily basis. Usually first thing in the morning you make your measurements and they become part of a national record. This isn't just in New Jersey, but it's nationwide. You can see here one event in April of 2022 where the redder dots show a very heavy rainfall. But look how close those darker blue and lighter blue, I'm showing you there are areas where very little rain fell. This really supplements are New Jersey weather and climate network with daily precipitation observations. Now they're only once a day, just like the co-operative stations are. I might add there several dozen co-operative stations but we have almost 300 observers doing this CoCoRaHs program as well. The take-home is we're recording the weather and climate of our state better than ever, but we can never have enough observations out there. I would encourage you to perhaps get in and become a CoCoRaHs observers. I might add that one real advantage of this CoCoRaHs program that we don't see in our automated network or even in the co-operative network, is the number of snowfall reports we get after an event. We map them up and post them on the state climate website. This just shows you the largest snow event of the winter of 2022, which gave the coast are real sacking of snow. Not so much up in that traditionally climates illogically snowy or parts of the northwestern corner of the state. But you can find tables and maps of snowstorms going back a decade or more on the state climate website. Finally, we always turn to the coast and this cartoon shows you how sea level is measured at Coastal title stations. You can see it also measures weather variables such as wind and temperature and barometric pressure. But you can see it's got a sensor there, the bobs up and down as the water level changes and that's put onto a data recorder, which transmits that data out by satellite telemetry. It actually sends it up to satellites. That's how we record the water level with this bobbing type of device but some stations also have this radar sensor below that will sense the water level below that sensor as well. You can measure it from above or you can measure it from within the water column as the gauge bobs up and down. Again, welcome to the world of weather and climate monitoring. There's more than ever of it. There's new innovations every day but what's most important is we're doing it at more of a local scale than ever before and more frequently than ever before. To really keep our finger on the pulse of New Jersey's weather and climate.
