Courtesy of UTA Planetarium
As summer temperatures rise, the Planetarium weather station has students covered, providing important weather information such as wind speed, temperature and outside humidity.
The weather station was added on top of the Chemistry and Physics Building in 2023, and the information it gathers became available online last year.
Planetarium program coordinator McKenna Dowd said the goal of the station is to provide real-time weather updates not just for Arlington but for UTA specifically.
The station is made up of a Davis Instruments Vantage 2 Pro Plus model equipped with temperature and humidity sensors, solar radiation and UV sensors, a rain collector and an anemometer.
The website for the weather station also provides data that shows the rain history and amount of rain collected throughout the year, the position of the sun relative to the time of day, the phase and luminosity of the moon, the air quality index and the barometric pressure.
Planetarium staff began discussing the idea of a weather station at UTA after realizing that the closest station that gave readings to Arlington was based in Fort Worth, Dowd said.
“We realized we don’t have any real-time weather for UTA,” she said. “We thought, ‘Why not get a weather station for our very own campus so we could have real-time and accurate information?’”
Students and departments at the university have used the collected data in research, and the Office of Emergency Management uses the data as well, Dowd said.
The sensor is also used when planetarium staff are planning observatory events.
Additions to the weather station will continue to be made. Dowd said the staff plans to add a cloud coverage sensor and a lightning detector.
The addition of a sky camera is also in the works, which could be used to display what the sky looks like in real time inside the planetarium. Dowd said a computer science student was hired to write the code.
“[The weather station has] been helpful so far to not only our observatory and for what we do at UTA but also students and research,” Dowd said.
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