Staff from the MN Department of Agriculture and NDAWN installed a MAWN/NDAWN weather station on July 23 and 24 on the University of Minnesota Crookston’s North Farm on Highway 75 North. MAWN is the Minnesota Agricultural Weather Network, and NDAWN is the ND Agricultural Weather Network.
Director of Operations for the Northwest Research and Outreach Center Maureen Aubul explains how installing an NDAWN Station in Minnesota came to be. “The ROC Systems, which is the Research and Outreach Centers, there are 10 of us in the state of Minnesota, and as an ROC System, we were trying to figure out a weather station that would suit us all, and we had done a couple of things that didn’t really pan out very well and the NDAWN stations were always kind of in the back of our minds so we just had a really good discussion at a meeting one day in St. Paul and decided why don’t we check out NDAWN.”
Director Aubul and her farm manager made a call to Daryl Ritchison at NDSU to have a conversation about NDAWN weather stations. “Darryl on the phone said they just happened to have, well, Minnesota Department of Agriculture had a line item of $3 Million in their budget to put NDAWN stations in Minnesota. Those stations are called MAWN, Minnesota Agricultural Weather Network,” says Director Aubul.
Director Aubul says the information collected from the MAWN weather station is available to the public. “Definitely, we are so excited about that. Crookston has always been a good place to have an NDAWN station, and we are very excited that anybody can log on to the NDAWN station or go onto our website and click on the link there and get all the information they need for just this area.”
The weather station is going to be a vital piece for the Research and Outreach Center. Director Aubul says she has four faculty members who are all scientists who work in several areas and work at getting grants to fund their programs. The data they receive in real-time from the weather station will help in their research, and the data they collect will help in their research as well.
Being able to have this weather station installed on the University of Minnesota Crookston land is a great opportunity for research, explains Director Aubul. “The NDAWN weather station is located about one mile north on Highway 75 heading north and is just right after the research plats that we have. At the Center, we do research on crops, and so there is about 186 acres of research plat out there, and that is our mission is to do research on the Red River Valley soil and the crops.” Director Aubul added that PI’s (principal investigators) from NWROC, St. Paul Campus, and other Research and Outreach Centers utilize the land for their research trials as well.
The weather station can measure air temperature, wind direction, speed, temperature of soil at different depths, relative humidity, barometric pressure, solar radiation, total precipitation, and more. Director Aubul says this information will be so important to the farmers in the area and the community. “I just think overall it’s going to be very good for the community of Crookston.” For more information, visit the NW Research and Outreach Center online or the NDAWN website.
