Minnesota Department of Agriculture and NDAWN personnel installed a MAWN/NDAWN weather station on the University of Minnesota Crookston North Farm on Highway 75 North on July 23 and 24. MAWN stands for the Minnesota Agricultural Weather Network and NDAWN stands for the ND Agricultural Weather Network.
Maureen Aubul, operations manager for the Northwest Research and Outreach Center, explains how the installation of an NDAWN station in Minnesota came about. “The ROC Systems, or Research and Outreach Centers, are ten in the state of Minnesota, and as an ROC System we were trying to find a weather station that would work for all of us. We had tried a few things that didn’t work so well, and the NDAWN stations were always kind of in the back of our minds, so one day at a meeting in St. Paul we had a really good discussion and decided why not look at NDAWN.”
Director Aubul and her farm manager called Daryl Ritchison of NDSU to talk about NDAWN weather stations. “Darryl said on the phone that they happened to have, well, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture had a $3 million line item in their budget to put NDAWN stations in Minnesota. These stations are called MAWN, Minnesota Agricultural Weather Network,” says Director Aubul.
Director Aubul says the information collected by the MAWN weather station is available to the public. “We’re really excited about that. Crookston has always been a good place for an NDAWN station and we’re really happy that anyone can log on to the NDAWN station or go to our website and click on the link there to get all the information they need for that exact area.”
The weather station will be an important part of the research and outreach center. Director Aubul says she has four faculty members, all scientists, working in different fields, who are trying to get grants to fund their programs. The data they receive in real time from the weather station will help them in their research, and the data they collect will help them in their research as well.
The opportunity to build this weather station on the University of Minnesota Crookston site is a great research opportunity, explains Director Aubul. “The NDAWN weather station is located about a mile north on Highway 75 heading north and is directly behind our research lands. We do crop research at the center and there are about 186 acres of research land there. Our mission is to research the soil and crops of the Red River Valley.” Director Aubul added that PIs (principal investigators) from NWROC, St. Paul Campus and other research and outreach centers also use the land for their research experiments.
The weather station can measure air temperature, wind direction, wind speed, soil temperature at different depths, relative humidity, air pressure, solar radiation, total rainfall and more. Director Aubul says this information will be very important to the farmers in the area and the community. “I just think it will be very good overall for the community of Crookston.” More information information, Visit the NW Research and Outreach Center online or the NDAWN website.
