We deployed a HOBO Weather Station in southern Alberta. It is used for recording precipitation, wind speed and direction, RH, air temperature, solar radiation and rainfall and soil temperature.

It is in the Lower Little Bow watershed next to a river. The reason we put it there is the nearest MET station is 10 km away, and we wanted to have site-specific data right in the watershed.

We were looking for a MET station and data logger that was easy to use and was a plug-and-play system. The price was really reasonable, and we knew HOBOs had a good reputation.

We download the data monthly. We are conducting hydrological modeling of the basin so we need to have access to local climate data to use in our computer modeling. We’re also looking at hydrology of the basin, river flow, and we need on-site weather data to correlate to the hydrology and river flows, so if we have a runoff event, for example, we know what the precipitation was. We can also use the MET data to estimate evapo-transpiration.

The reliability of the system has been good, despite the fact that the weather gets down to -30ºC in winter, and we have really strong Chinook winds sometimes in excess of 100 km per hour.