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Wisconsin weather monitoring network expands, gets new website

Wisconsin’s online weather and soil monitoring network has received some upgrades.

Christopher Kucharik is with the Wisconsin Energy Institute, a part of the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  He tells Brownfield the Wisconet environmental mesonet just launched a new website improving free and easy access to their network of monitoring stations.  He says each station collects data every five minutes, recording wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity and more. “How much solar radiation is coming in, the precipitation, the rainfall that’s occuring. Barametric pressure is another one, and then below ground, we have a series of soil monitoring sensors which are collecting temperature and moisture.”

Kucharik says back in the 1990s, there was a similar network at the University of Wisconsin research farms, but all except the Hancock and Arlington stations went away when funding dried up.  Kucharik says they re-started the program with fourteen stations in 2022, and they’ve expanded. “Twenty by the end of 2023, and then we added thirty-eight stations in 2024. That got us up to fifty-eight stations, and then in the last couple of days, we’ve added a couple of new stations and we’re up to sixty now.”

And, Kucharik says they plan to have eighty Wisconsin weather stations by the end of the summer.

The Wisconet sites are mostly one per county, with some heavier concentrations in Door County and central Wisconsin to provide more data to the cherry, apple, and cranberry growers.  Kucharik says they are also considering adding taller towers to study temperature inversions and cameras to track the stages of plant growth, but that will require consistent funding from their sources including USDA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Kucharik says Oklahoma built the first large-scale monitoring network in the 1990s.  Similar mesonet weather station networks can be found in thirty states. A link to a state directory can be found here.

AUDIO: Christopher Kucharik discusses the recent upgrades to the Wisconet weather monitoring stations with Brownfield’s Larry Lee.