More on upcoming weather tower from Mesonet manager

Lincoln Parish citizens who want to get a live, in-depth look at local weather conditions online will soon be in luck.

Concrete has been poured at the Big Creek Road site where the Louisiana State Mesonet program will install its next 30-foot weather monitoring tower within the next week or two, providing a trove of temperature, wind, soil and other information on a free online database.

“We’re getting the word out that this is to help everybody, from the government official to the crawfish farmer and everyone in between,” Mesonet Manager Emily Newby said.

A project of the University of Louisiana at Monroe’s Atmospheric Science program inside the School of Science, the Louisiana Mesonet is an interconnected network of weather monitoring stations.

Fifty sites are currently planned, four are up and running, and Lincoln Parish’s site will be one of the next to go online after a brief delay from Monday’s original build date.

The towers can measure wind speed, wind direction, air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, air pressure, precipitation, and soil temperature and moisture at various depths.

Potential sites for towers were identified in partnership with each of the National Weather Service stations that cover Louisiana.

“They initially identified 100 data blind spots, coverage gaps — radars not reaching, a lack of automated stations, especially in rural parts of Louisiana,” Newby said. “So if there’s severe weather rolling in and the (NWS) needs to see what it looks like 60 miles down the road, the Mesonet will help them do that.”

Live data will be available to the public for free within a matter of days after the tower’s construction here.

Lincoln Parish’s Mesonet tower will be located on the police jury’s dirt pit on Big Creek Road near Dubach. The jury approved an agreement with the Mesonet program for use of the site in July.

It’s still the parish’s land, and the Mesonet tower is powered by its own solar panel and backup battery.

“People think it’s this giant thing, but it’s really a tower that’s small enough that I can wrap my arms around it,” Newby said.

Getting a better look at live conditions in the midst of severe weather — called “nowcasting” — is a major part of the Mesonet’s function, but that’s not all.

With the ability to show the five-minute average for both soil temperature and moisture at depths ranging from 5 centimeters to 50 centimeters, the Mesonet could be a boon to farmers and the agriculture industry.

“There’s not an accurate soil monitoring system, not as big and widespread as the Mesonet is going to be,” Newby said. “The state will be able to use it to create drought monitoring maps. Farmers can use it to say they’re in drought stage 3 or 4 or whatever it may be.”

Aviation and education are among the many other industries that could also benefit from the data of a completed Mesonet.

Residents interested in the Louisiana State Mesonet project can email mesonet@ulm.edu for more information.