[Archivist]

Weather Stations for Pest and Disease Monitoring (PDF of archived thread)

[Brittany Kordick]

We have had a RainWise weather station linked to NEWA in our orchard for a few years. We’re just about to set up a RIMPro subscription, and it’s led to some scrutiny of our current station setup. Upon purchase, RainWise advised us not to situate the station immediately within our orchard since it would be subject to sprays that could damage electronics (I think, in particular, we may have even mentioned to them at the time that we sprayed a lot of oil year round). So we set it up outside the orchard proper, but within 100 feet of an outer edge. To be in line with our wifi signal, we had to put the station in a location that is slightly protected by a woods line to the northwest, and over the years, we’ve become aware that our wind speed data is consistently lower mph than the orchard proper in this location, made worse by the fact that our wind direction is typically from the northwest. Since one of the RIMPro models we’re going to be taking advantage of likely factors in wind speed (or we hope it does, for accuracy sake), we’re revisiting moving the station. Some interesting questions have arisen as a result.

Since our weather station previously was not able to tabulate the wetting events associated with our sprays within the orchard, we’re wondering if any of our past modelling has been seriously affected. Granted, we spray with an airblast and so the duration of the wetting event is likely to be pretty short most of the time, but a wetting event is a wetting event. In hindsight, this would seem to be a great reason to situate a weather station directly in one’s orchard, so that it is truly subjected to everything the trees are. I wouldn’t want to hit it with certain materials like lime sulfur, but I suppose you could always put a garbage bag over it when you take a pass with a spray material that could damage the unit. On the other hand, we have let local community members, and regional growers and researchers know about our station and they also may take advantage of the modelling currently provided by NEWA. If we do move the station to a location that records more wetting events and modelling is impacted, then the modelling would not be well calibrated for any location outside our orchard.

All this has made me wonder where most orchardists choose to locate their stations — within the orchard proper or outside, but close by?