Fascinating Read - Summer Camp Microclimate: A Close-Up Look

[malaise]

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/summer-camp-microclimate-close-look
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Summer is finally here, bringing ice pops, kickball games, Hawaiian shirts, and campfire songs. Camp counselors know what this means: 100°F-degree days where the ten-foot walk to the storage shed to grab basketballs leaves you drenched in sweat. It seems like there’s no way to escape the summer-time heat…or is there?

Surroundings like trees, buildings, pavement, and topography can impact the weather on a very small scale, making the temperature feel different from place to place. As a camp counselor in Maryland and an atmospheric science student, I always knew that children in my group could get a reprieve from the heat and humidity by heading to the wooded stream valley to build tree forts. Measuring the temperature difference between the hot center of camp and the cooler woods 600 feet away inspired me to build a five-station weather network for my summer camp.

Each station was personally designed to fit the needs of each location, hand-built by myself using electronics and hardware that can easily be found online, and programmed using modified open-source software. These stations are solar-powered and run off a small computer called an Arduino. They collect temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, and UV index year round, forwarding this information through radio frequencies to a base station. All stations are connected through a mesh network, which insures that all weather data is collected and transmitted, even from the most distant locations of camp. Once the data reaches the base station, it is published to the Internet, and can be seen through an iPhone app.

Because these stations are dispersed throughout remote locations of camp where there isn’t access to the Internet, these stations aren’t synced through the Weather Underground network

[d_r]

1. So, if I am reading this correctly,

It is suggesting that it is actually cooler in shady areas than in sunny concrete areas.

[malaise]

2. He's saying more than that

One evening, a cold front rolled through around 11:00 p.m. and sent temperatures at most stations plummeting. At the stream valley, though, the temperature increased as the others fell. Here, the topography impacted the temperature. As the cold front moved through, it pushed the existing warm air into the stream valley (see Figure 3). Eventually, the cold air settled even into the recesses of the stream valley, completing the camp-wide cooldown. In this case, the local topography made a cold front do the opposite of what it’s supposed to do in the stream valley.

This example shows us how weather is not the same everywhere, even across a small campground. Features like clouds and fronts aren’t the only things that can impact the weather: trees, pavement, and even topography play a role in local meteorology too.