Open-weather Cornish Ground Station
We are working with the amazing Open-weather and Goonown Growers to install a ground weather station on the building of CAST.
Open-weather have designed DIY aerials and open source software, trained recorders and installed ground stations; creating a global network of weather image collection. Their aerials can receive weather images from three US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites.
Half way through Open-weathers Year of Weather, these satellites are facing an uncertain future; the US government has recently announced the defunding of many services, including decommissioning of environmental datasets and data services.
Our ground station is hosted by us and local organic farmers Goonown Growers. Alongside automatically recording images we will both be adding weather reflections based on our work on the land and coastlines of Cornwall.
Over the last half a year we have been trying to learn a little how to interpret these beautiful images of familiar landmasses and unfamiliar cloudmasses, not often sure what exactly we are looking at. One thing has been certain over the last few months- its been mostly warm and dry. We have seen many clear outlines of the Cornish coast sent down to us via audio file from the satellites.
It feels sadly fitting to have spent these months with our ground station, thinking more about weather, whilst the coast our work focuses on, is currently experiencing the warmest heat waves since records began.
Throughout April and May we have seen an ‘unprecedented’ marine heatwave in the northeastern Atlantic. The Met Office has described this heatwave as being unusual in its intensity and persistence.
The last time this was observed was in 2023, at the time the most severe marine heatwave recorded in this part of the ocean. Then, both Ruth and I were working harvesting seaweed at every low tide on The Lizard peninsular. Unaware of the data being gathered that summer, we anecdotally saw a large bleaching and dieback of our favourite seaweed Dulse. We worried about its recovery after this local marine heatwave and we wondered what data was being gathered on the effect of heat on the very shallow waters of the intertidal. The Dulse seemed to recover well but we couldn’t help wondering how many of these events the ecosystem could withstand. Now working less physically close to this ecosystem, seeing more extreme marine heatwaves, we are left even more concerned for their future.
