A year ago, Oklahoma City Micronet made its official debut during a commissioning ceremony that took place at the National Weather Festival at the National Weather Center in Norman.
Oklahoma City Micronet was designed over a five-year period to improve atmospheric monitoring across the metropolitan area. On any given day there can be weather differences throughout the 40-site network of real time weather stations across Oklahoma City.
The fifth annual National Weather Festival is from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the National Weather Center, 120 David L. Boren Blvd., in Norman. The free event open to everyone features tours, children’s activities and displays.
So I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at the Oklahoma City Micronet, which consists of four land stations, like those throughout the state in the overall Oklahoma Mesonet, in addition to 36 miniature weather stations mounted on top of Oklahoma City traffic signals.
"It has been a tremendous year for OKCNET, even better than I had hoped,” said Jeff Basara, director of research for the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
"The network has been very stable from an operations standpoint and has collected some rather unique observations from a number of rather interesting events.”
Basara said the field of urban meteorology is still, in many ways, untapped. The primary reason is the lack of quality observations in urban areas, he added.
"OKCNET was designed to fill that void,” Basara said, "and due to the constant data collection for all weather conditions, we’ve collected extremely valuable data that is really going to advance our overall understanding of urban-atmosphere interactions.”
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