A Technical Overview of the New York State Mesonet Standard Network

Abstract

The New York State Mesonet (NYSM) is a network of 126 standard environmental monitoring stations deployed statewide with an average spacing of 27 km. The primary goal of the NYSM is to provide high quality weather data at high spatial and temporal scales to improve atmospheric monitoring and prediction, especially for extreme weather events. Compared with other statewide networks, the NYSM faced considerable deployment obstacles with New York’s complex terrain, forests, and very rural and urban areas; its wide range of weather extremes; and its harsh winter conditions. To overcome these challenges, the NYSM adopted a number of innovations unique among statewide monitoring systems, including: (1) Strict adherence to international siting standards and metadata documentation; (2) A hardened system design to facilitate continued operations during extreme, high-impact weather; (3) A station design optimized to monitor winter weather conditions; and (4) a camera installed at every site to aid situational awareness. Completed in spring 2018, the network provides data and products to a variety of sectors including weather monitoring and forecasting, emergency management, agriculture, transportation, utilities, and education. This paper focuses on the standard network of the NYSM and reviews the network siting, site configuration, sensors, site communications and power, network operations and maintenance, data quality control, and dissemination. A few example analyses are shown which highlight the benefits of the NYSM.

Vertical Profiles of Ozone Concentrations in the Lower Troposphere Downwind of New York City During LISTOS 2018–2019

“…Yellow indicates an MDA8O 3 between 55 and 70 ppb, orange indicates values between 71 and 85 ppb, red indicates values between 86 and 105 ppb, and purple indicates values between 106 and 200 ppb. Scanning Doppler lidar vertical profiles are from the NYS Mesonet Profiler Network (Brotzge et al., 2020). Horizontal wind direction is indicated by a barb and speed is indicated by color.…”

Evolution of Aerosol Under Moist and Fog Conditions in a Rural Forest Environment: Insights From High‐Resolution Aerosol Mass Spectrometry

“…The average mass fractions for other species were 14% for SO 4 , 2% for NO 3 , 7% for NH 4 , and 1% for Cl. During this period, there were four nights with maximum RH > 96%, and the first three nights were verified as having fog conditions from images captured by the camera from the Addison New York State Mesonet station (Text S1 and Figure S2; Brotzge et al, 2020). At the same time, during the four overnight periods, the temperature was generally below 15°C, and the wind speed was generally below 1 m s −1 from the west, indicating a stagnant boundary layer with cool temperatures and moist conditions (Figure S1).…”

Quality management system and design of an integrated mesoscale meteorological network in Central Italy

“…The observational lack of a network can be filled not only by surface observations but also by ground‐based remote sensing observations (Brotzge et al, 2020; Fiebrich et al, 2021; Illingworth et al, 2015, 2019): mini‐radar (X‐band), lidars, ceilometers, Doppler lidars, wind profilers, microwave radiometers, weather observing uncrewed aircraft systems,. Nowadays, all these instruments can be affordable by regional authorities and they should be considered during the design process (Frei, 2003).…”

“…The observational lack of a network can be filled not only by surface observations but also by ground-based remote sensing observations (Brotzge et al, 2020; The final network MET after the adjustment of not representative sites. Sites are labelled with their regional identification code.…”