While attending the Women in Agriculture Conference, Farm Director KC Sheperd caught up with Mesonet Ag Coordinator Wes Lee to learn what the mesonet is and how to use it.
“The Mesonet is a set of 120 towers across the state that are fully automated to gather any kind of weather information you can imagine. We get an update from the towers every five minutes, so we have data collected nearby, and is frequently reported. Any weather data you want to look at, you can use our apps on Apple or Android, or our website at mesonet.org, free of charge,” Lee explained.
Some examples of the weather data collected are rainfall, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, soil temperature, and moisture. He said that rainfall and soil moisture are the most sought-after by members of the agricultural community.
“We try to have something for everyone, so we also have several products for livestock producers,” he said. We have a Cattle Comfort tool that is a glorified heat index and wind chill product. There are also dispersion maps that are important when spreading manure.”
Oklahoma’s mesonet is, in fact, the gold standard for other states. “There are about thirty-one other states that have some type of state-operated program, but we are the largest in the country and the oldest continually run weather networks in the world. Kentucky and New York have products similar to ours. New York has funding issues, so they’ll build up after a big storm with federal dollars, and then they’ll go away for a few years. We’ve been successful at operating continually for over thirty years.”
Lee encouraged users to try the website first when looking for information. There is an Agriculture tab at the top which leads to all of the agricultural products and weather maps.
His second choice is the app. “You will notice that there are a lot of products that are on the website, including a lot of the ag tools that aren’t on the app currently,” Lee said.
Then about the website, he added, “It is customizable. You can look for products that you like, select those as favorites, and they will show up easier and more frequently. Also, you can pull sections of our website and add an icon to your phone or tablet to take you right into that part of the webpage so you don’t have to search for it every time.”
He cautioned users that it may take a little time to learn to navigate the website because it is enormous and is constantly being updated. He said that this is when saving favored products as either shortcuts or bookmarks becomes valuable.
