Guana Tolomato Matanzas Reserve, Florida

Guana Tolomato Matanzas Reserve, Florida

GTM Reserve Reaches for the Sky...
Reserve Installs New Weather Station

No, that’s not a UFO that has landed in the marsh. Recently, GTM Reserve research staff members have erected and initiated operation of a Campbell Scientific Weather station, the newest addition to the System-Wide Monitoring Program. The 10-foot tall aluminum tower serves as a backbone for the attachment of environmental sensors that record air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and photosynthetically active radiation (the solar energy that plants use in the process of photosynthesis). An additional instrument devised to measure rainfall levels is situated approximately two feet away from the tower. Both the tower and rain gauge are mounted to a five-foot high wooden platform located at the water’s edge within the Princess Place Preserve near the mouth of Pellicer Creek. The location of the weather station is optimal in the sense that it is within the aquatic system that we are striving to understand (in the salt marsh with a distant tree line verses a nearby upland area) and within close proximity to our Pellicer Creek water quality monitoring station.

The addition of the weather station to the System-Wide Monitoring Program is a crucial component in clarifying the natural processes in our estuaries. Once incorporated into our water quality data, we will learn how these meteorological parameters affect our waters. Like the water quality instruments, which record at the top and bottom of each hour throughout the year, the majority of the meteorological sensors record data every 15 minutes throughout the year. Some parameters, such as rainfall and photosynthetically active radiation, are totaled on a daily basis. GTM Reserve researchers visit the weather station to download the meteorological data to a palm pilot and clean the sensors to ensure the validity of the data. As with the water quality data, meteorological data will be available (after our annual submission) on the Web for use by interested locals and scientists around the world. If you have any questions about the weather station, you can contact our research assistant Jon Brucker by email at: jonbrucker@bellsouth.net.