STAR Automatic Surface Weather Stations

A small mesonet of 10 automatic weather stations, within a 100 km radius of Iqaluit were installed at the end of September 2007 . The weather stations were positioned over various forms of topography to assess storm influences on surface weather. By collaborating with the local northern groups, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) and Qulliq Energy Corp., four of the mesonet weather stations provided real-time weather data. Nine of these stations measured 3m wind velocity, pressure, 2m temperature, and 2m humidity every 10-minutes. One of the ten stations was a 10-m tower installation at the Environment Canada site in Iqaluit. This 10-m tower was equipped with similar instrumentation as the other mesonet stations, but also included anemometers sampling at 10 m, 4 m, 3 m, 2 m and 1 m and a

visibility sensor. The Sentry visibility sensor has a maximum range up to 16 km, and was set to record data at one-minute sampling intervals. In addition to the ten southern Baffin Island weather station sites, an additional automatic weather station was setup in the community of Pangnirtung, October 13 – November 18, 2007. In addition, a MAWS201 automatic weather station produced by Vaisala was set up ~100 m west of the weather station at the Pangnirtung airport on Oct 13, 2007. This weather station was only operational between the dates of October 13 – November 18, 2007, during the time periods were STAR personal were in Pangnirtung.