Mobile Mesonets and PODs

The DOW Facility operates a fleet of three instrumented mobile mesonet vehicles. These are equipped with standard instruments for measuring wind, temperature, and relative humidity, mounted far forward at 4 m (13.5 feet) above ground level to avoid vehicle slip stream. Mobile mesonet deployments have been requested for several research projects including RELAMPAGO, PECAN, VORTEX2, ASCII, OWLeS, and TWIRL to augment/compliment DOW and other observations aloft.

The DOW Facility operates an array of approximately 15 rapidly deployable ruggedized “PODs” (pictured at right). These collect standard meteorological observations of temperature, relative humidity, wind speed/direction and pressure at 1 m AGL (depending on configuration), and video or time lapse photographs. They were initially designed for tornado and hurricane low-level wind and damage studies, but their use as a general purpose quickly-deployable weather stations have made them ideally suited to gather data for a variety of scientific objectives. They were requested for and/or deployed in ASCII, OWLeS, ROTATE, VORTEX2, PECAN, RELAMPAGO, TWIRL and several educational projects to augment DOW observations aloft and provide educational benefit. Four additional PODs can be deployed with disdrometer arrays. Roughly 4-5 pods can be transported in the back of each CSWR mobile mesonet vehicle. PODs are usually provided, at zero cost, to educational and outreach missions.

Researchers can request mobile mesonet or Pod deployments with or without DOWs.