There is one important rule in meteorology: If you want to forecast locally, you have to measure locally.
That’s why it was a good idea 100 years ago that in almost every parish a pastor or teacher climbed a small staircase three times a day and read the instruments in the weather hut morning, noon and evening and the observers also wrote down how many eighths of the sky covered by clouds, how far you could see and how deep the snow was.
Then, unfortunately, not too long ago came automation in meteorology. Which of course isn’t just stupid, there are now satellites, radar and a lot of great things that didn’t exist before.
What was lost, however, was the amount of local information that no model, no matter how finely woven, can replace (ours has a mesh size of 1×1 km): knowing when the foehn will come down to Egg, how much rain the thunderstorm hanging on the Pfänder needs in Jungholz and how exactly does the foehn work in a west-east valley, and while we’re in St. Gerold, when the cold air seeps in from the north, is it sometimes faster from the Faschinajoch than from Lake Constance?
We want to find out all that. The mobile phone provider 3 and we in front of LändleTV-Wetter want to distribute 50 weather stations in Vorarlberg at our expense – in mountains and valleys. There is Austrian technopower in the project, you see the gifted Metrilog director Britta Hubert with the professional weather station (the Metrilog sends the data around), which you can also have at your location, on your cable car.
Temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind, amount of precipitation, type of precipitation and solar radiation are measured.
Of course, the station partner gets the measurements free of charge for his purposes, after the forecasts you can set the clock after about 18 months if the peculiarities of the location can be statistically calculated and we know the secrets that otherwise only local residents know.
If you would like to have such a weather station in your community, please send an email to [email protected]. I’ll call you and we’ll discuss everything else. If you see the mayor Dr. Kurt or Clemens M. from Lustenau (the community on the Rhine!) you can ask them how it was set up. If you want to test how good weather forecasts are before you have the help of all the weather stations, you can here Enter your location.
