Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 01/03/2008 - 10:59

Hey Kirk, this is Jeff from Oklahoma.  THis is so cool that you are getting to do this.  Hey I saw that an Ozone expedition is also happening at this time.  Do the weather stations also have ozone monitoring equipment on them or is that done purely from satellite info.?  Here in Oklahoma the Univ. of Okla. has 117 automated weather stations across the state that you can access for real-time weather date.  Are the weather stations in Antarctica also automated an able to be accessed by the public?

 

Have a great time. I am following along.

 

Jeff Lawrence

Lowrey  School

Oklahoma 

Kirk Beckendorf

Hi Jeff,It's great to hear from you.
Tomorrow we are going to start going out to stations so I will begin talking more about the science and stations than what I have done so far. We are scheduled to fly out to the first station that we will be visiting, it is on the north end of Ross Island.  
The stations do not have ozone monitoring instruments. The ozone hole is measured both with satellites and also with ozonsondes (baically weather balloons with ozone measuring instruments attached). The ozone layer is 12+ miles high and the weather stations only monitor what is occuring a few feet above the ground. There is real time data available online at
http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu/aws.html
You can view the data as a map of the continent or a specific region, or you can view meteorograms of specific stations. There is also a map of the stations at
 http://uwamrc.ssec.wisc.edu/images/awsmap.jpg
 Thanks for writing.
Kirk