Grandfather Mountain slightly closer to posting data from the new anemometer on its website

The road to the installation of Grandfather’s new anemometer was long and difficult, but the road to making the data collected by that wind gauge available on Grandfather Mountain’s website is no less complicated.

The data logger began storing information on February 12 when the new anemometer was installed on the Swinging Bridge, but it was a few days more before additional software could be installed on the computer connected to the weather instruments to retrieve the numbers for meteorologists to evaluate.

At that point discussions began over the intervals of the gusts being measured. In keeping with the current U.S. standard, the data logger was originally set to report wind speeds averaged over a five-second interval. The equipment has since been adjusted to collect data at any interval, which Grandfather Mountain President Crae Morton says will be useful for comparing the new instrument to the old instruments.

“The experts are currently discussing whether Grandfather Mountain will report a three or five-second gust,” Morton said. “It seems that the National Weather Service is now moving to three-second gusts and if that is the case then we will do the same.”

Meanwhile, the computer engineer from Appalachian State University who volunteered to design a database program to manage the data and post it to the Internet was stalled because the thermometer and humidity gauge were reporting numbers that did not make sense.

“I know that it has not been minus 30 degrees centigrade on top of Grandfather Mountain this month,” said Kinney Baughman of the Appalachian Regional Development Institute. ”I don’t think minus 1.2 humidity is even possible.”

Maybe it did not get as cold as minus 30 degrees centigrade, but on St. Patrick's Day heavy rime ice in combination with gusty winds did break the lightening rod, blow the thermometer into the trees beneath the Bridge and put a ninety-degree bend in the metal rod supporting the wind gauge.

The wind gauge was returned to its proper position with the help Ameen Syed of the North Carolina Climate Office, while a new thermometer and humidity gauge are on order. Although it will be nice to be able to measure temperature and humidity, Grandfather's priority is the wind meter. Says Crae Morton, "thankfully the anemometer has been working perfectly since day one."

Baughman will soon begin writing the computer code that will make sense of the numbers and make them available to the public via the Grandfather Mountain website. “We still need to decide exactly what information we want to report on the Internet,” said Baughman. “There will be a great deal of testing and debugging required, so I don’t know how long it might take to get the information to the website.”

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