Center for Coastal Studies: 'Your local, friendly neighborhood weather station'

Frankie Rowley, Cape Cod Times
Updated ·2 min read

Almost three years ago, the Center for Coastal Studies installed a new weather station atop their Hiebert Marine Laboratory in Provincetown. Now, the center has announced its weather data is finally publicly accessible, giving the Cape another way to check the weather.

Installed by Owen Nichols, interdisciplinary research coordinator at the center and Jerry Evans, owner of Chatham Wind and Time in March 2021 and funded by the center’s “Fund-a-need” online auction, the station records weather parameters such as wind speed, temperature and barometric pressure.

The weather station data can be found at https://coastalstudies.org/ccs-weather-station/

“We've wanted to have one for quite some time,” Nichols said. “There are other weather data sources accessible around the area, but they don't collect data as frequently as we would like that's accessible for research purposes. It was really useful for a variety of different reasons. For fieldwork, for research purposes, for archiving data, storms.”

Ashley Millan Ambert, flight coordinator for the Center for Coastal Studies right whale ecology program in Provincetown, examines weather data on Dec. 29 at the center's weather station. Those readings will now be available to the public.
Ashley Millan Ambert, flight coordinator for the Center for Coastal Studies right whale ecology program in Provincetown, examines weather data on Dec. 29 at the center's weather station. Those readings will now be available to the public.

How frequently is the weather station data updated?

Data is updated and archived every 30 minutes to the center’s servers and shared with others via the Weather Link network. It is accessible to the center’s researchers and to members of the public to use for personal and educational purposes.

“Sometimes it's a matter of you don't always know how often a weather station is maintained or sometimes there are gaps in the archival data when you go to check another weather source," Nichols said. "So having control over the data quality and the access to the information is really important for us and being able to share it. We wanted to make sure it was accessible research, not just for researchers, but also for our students and teachers as well.”

The weather recording device on the roof of the Center for Coastal Studies weather station in Provincetown. The readings will now be available to the public.
The weather recording device on the roof of the Center for Coastal Studies weather station in Provincetown. The readings will now be available to the public.

Public accessibility was a goal of the station from the get-go, according to Nichols. While some issues arose within the first few years of operation, the real delay in getting the information out to the public was finding the time to get the data on the website.

“I had wanted to do this some time ago, but we just finally got around to doing it,” Nichols said. “It was good to have a little bit of data first to make sure we felt good about its reliability. We had a couple of issues getting it to remain attached to the internet and our server even during power failures … and it took us a little while to get the bugs out of that.”

Overall, the station serves the center just as much as the people.

“This is kind of your local, friendly neighborhood weather station,” Nichols said. “It's local. It's very accessible. It's right in our community. With that comes pros and cons. It might not be up on a meteorological tower somewhere, but it's there, it's readily accessible and tells what's going on next door.”

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: How's the weather? Ask a brand new resource in Provincetown