Red Cliff Partners with Bayfield Students to Create Weather Station
This winter, a new project came together at Bayfield High School’s Alternative Education class, taught by Rick Erickson and Tony Thier. One day, Alex Breslav (Red Cliff’s Indigenous Arts and Sciences – IAS - Coordinator), who has been working with the class through the year, brought a stack of large cardboard boxes labeled “Davis Instruments.” Inside those boxes was an unassembled weather station – the result of NOAA’s SeaGrant that was awarded to Red Cliff’s IAS program through the efforts of University of Wisconsin’s Earth Partnership team and Chad Abel, administrator of Red Cliff’s Treaty Natural Resources department.
The kids were impressed, and immediately set about figuring out how to put it together. All that Lego training was not for naught! However, along the way many questions had to be answered. How its unique design was supposed to fit together and function. How to make the station’s radio signal reach the Wi-Fi connected receiver. How to install it in a level way while there is over a foot of snow on the ground. And last but not least, how to connect it to the world-wide Weather Underground network so that its data could be available to the public and the scientific community.
In the end, the class triumphed over the challenges, while learning many lessons about technology and meteorology along the way. The station now proudly stands on the grounds of Bayfield School, making it possible for students to engage in the climate monitoring of their watershed first hand – as well as enriching the local community and the world. It provides read-outs of temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed, wind gusts, dewpoint, precipitation rate and accumulation, atmospheric pressure, and even has a UV reading. It’s possible to view the data as graph and tables, as well as view it historically.
Chi-miigwech to all the students, teachers, and everyone else involved. This station is bound to serve the school, Red Cliff, Bayfield, and the world for years to come!
Here are the several ways to look up this station:
1. Go to the Weather Underground website ( www.weatherunderground.com ) and enter “Bayfield, WI” in the website’s search bar. Next, to access detailed information of this station, click on the blue “Bayfield Station” wording that is seen in the top left of the screen.
2. Go to the Weather Underground website ( www.weatherunderground.com ) and enter “KWIBAYFI20” in the website’s search bar. ( KWIBAYFI20 is the station’s ID name.)
3. Directly type in the Weather Underground link to the station in your browser’s search bar: https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KWIBAYFI20
4. Download the free “Weather Underground” smartphone app and use the designation KWIBAYFI20 to look up the station.
5. Go to the WeatherLink web-page ( www.weatherlink.com ), register, and look up “Bayfield school.”
6. Download the free “Davis WeatherLink” smartphone app (you will need to register), and look up “Bayfield school”.