TITLE: Mesonet Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) Network [JOSS] CONTACTS: Steve Williams P.O. Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307-3000 Email sfw@ucar.edu 303-497-8164 (voice) 970-491-8293 (fax) 1.0 DATA SET OVERVIEW This data set contains hourly or 15-minute resolution surface meteorological data from the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) Network. These OARDC stations are located across the state of Ohio. This data set covers the period from 01 May to 14 July 2003. Nine of the stations provide hourly observations and two provide 15-minute observations. The data are in comma-delimited ASCII format. 2.0 INSTRUMENT DESCRIPTION Information in this readme is from the OARDC home page (http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/centernet/weather.htm). Since the weather stations were established in support of agricultural research, instrumentation was designed to provide the data elements most critical for this purpose. Each station is equipped with a DC-powered Campbell Scientific datalogger and a DC-powered modem to provide data storage and transmittal to the central computer storage facility on the Wooster campus of the OARDC. Data are automatically retrieved daily around 6:00 am, EST and are available shortly after that. The dataloggers are able to retain almost one month of hourly data in the situation that telephone line problems prevents daily retrieval. Instrumentation includes sensors to measure global solar radiation at 6 m; temperature and relative humidity in a non-aspirated shelter at 1.5m; soil temperatures at 5 and 10 cm below a bare soil surface; wind speed and wind direction at 5 m, and precipitation at 1 m. 2.1 Station Locations Station Name Location Latitude Longitude Elev (ft) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Columbus OSU Columbus Campus 39 59 N 83 01 W 800 Delware USDA Research Station 40 21 N 83 04 W 940 Grape OARDC Grape Research 41 53 N 80 04 W 789 Jackson OARDC Jackson Branch 39 01 N 82 36 W 680 Madison (sunleaf) USDA Research Station 41 48 N 81 04 W Miami Miami University Campus 39 32 N 84 44 W 940 Northwest OARDC Northwestern Branch 41 13 N 83 46 W 700 Perry USDA Research Station 41 46 N 81 09 W Piketon Piketon Research Extension 39 04 N 83 00 W 578 Western OARDC Western Branch 39 52 N 83 40 W 1110 Wooster OARDC Wooster Campus 40 47 N 81 55 W 1020 Latitude and Longitude are in degrees minutes. Elevations are in feet. The Perry and Madison (sunleaf) stations provide 15-minute observations, the others provide hourly observations. 3.0 DATA COLLECTION AND PROCESSING Information on the collection and processing of these data can be found at the OARDC page: http://www.oardc.ohio-state.edu/centernet/weather.htm UCAR/JOSS conducted no processing or quality control on these data. 4.0 DATA FORMAT AND FILE NAMING 4.1 Data Format These data are in comma-delimited ASCII format. Hourly (field title and description). All hourly measurements are Metric. Date - calendar date Hour - hour of the day. Midnight = 2400 Precip - liquid precipitation in mm Air Temp - temperature of the air in degrees Celsius Solar Radiation - solar radiation in kilowatts per square meter Note: valid only for daylight hours. Sometimes bright moonlight or other events may cause spurious night-time recorded values. Humidity - % relative humidity 5cm Soil Temp - temperature of the soil at 5cm depth in degrees Celsius 10 cm Soil Temp - temperature of the soil at 10 cm depth in degrees Celsius Scalar Wind Speed - wind speed in miles per hour, disregarding direction Vector Wind Speed - wind speed in miles per hour, taking direction into effect Wind Direction - wind direction, north is 0 or 360 degrees, south is 180 St. Dev. of Vector Wind Speed - overall variation of wind directions in degrees 4.2 File Naming conventions sunleaf.csv where: sunleaf is the station name (see station table above). 5.0 DATA REMARKS None. 6.0 REFERENCES None.