Los Angeles Pierce College Weather Station

STATION SUMMARY
The Los Angeles Pierce College Weather Station was founded under the direction of the late A. Lee Haines on July 1, 1949, just 2 years after the college was founded. Professor Haines taught botany here at Pierce, which was then known as the Clarence W. Pierce School of Agriculture. At the time, the college had an all-male student population of just over 100 students, most of who lived on campus in dormitories. For 18 years Professor Haines sent his daily observations to the Weather Bureau before it was renamed in 1967 to the National Weather Service. Professor Haines retired 4 years later and passed on his responsibilities to another professor.

That professor was James Vernon, Professor of Geology and Meteorology, who took over as Station Manager in 1971. In 1974, Professor Vernon obtained funding from a grant awarded to Pierce College from the National Science Foundation (NSF), funding of which was used to expand the station's capabilities and upgrade its equipment. By the time Professor Vernon retired, the student population at Pierce had grown to over 25,000 and the weather station's paper archives stretched back nearly 4 decades.

In 1987, William H. Russell, Professor of Geography and Meteorology took over as the new—and current—Weather Station Manager. For 10 years Professor Russell recorded daily observations from the station's cotton region shelter and evaporation sub-station and sent his reports in to the National Weather Service office in Oxnard, California.

In 1997, Professor Russell hired me, Steve W. Woodruff, to perform the daily weather observations at the station. At the time I was a student in Professor Russell's Meteorology class. From October 1997 through October 2004, I recorded daily observations 7 days a week without missing a single day. I finished his studies in 1999 and continued on to a university, but continued to volunteer at the station every day. During the summer of 1998, I began manually compiling all the station's paper records and into Excel spreadsheets with the intention of possibly using the data for my thesis at the university, but quickly realized that it was too much data to keep to myself so I converted the files over to HTML and sought to get the data online to share with anyone interested.

Near the end of 1998, I had finished hand compiling all the data and presented Professor Russell with a handful of 3.5-inch "floppy" disks with the digitized data linked to a simple webpage. A few days later the Pierce College Weather Station Website was online when the tech department at Pierce, more or less, consisted of one person. In 2000, I added additional pages to the website, including Water & Weather and Atmospheric Stability which have become two of the website's most popular pages; referenced numerous times for different topics on Wikipedia and college websites.

In November 2004, Professor Russell and I coordinated to obtain grant funding to purchase the station's first automated weather station; Campbell Scientific's, MetData1. Professor Russell ordered the sensors and tower with my recommendation and with help from Tim Boyle, campus tech at the University of California, Northridge (CSUN), I programmed the station to upload complete observations every 15 minutes, rather than the hourly observations used at all other automated stations in the entire Los Angeles basin.

In December 2004, I reprogrammed the station to report data every 10-minutes in order to provide 6 times more data an hour than any other station at the time. In fact, the 10-minute data format I started is now fast becoming the standard, as CSUN and other colleges and universities across the nation follow suit. All new automated stations entering the National Weather Service's co-op program are requested by the NWS to create a 10-minute upload in addition to hourly and 24-hour displays.

For several years, the automated MetData1 weather station continued to run alongside our still-used cotton region shelter. In 2009, just as I was finishing up a grant project for the National Weather Service office in Oxnard, our college was awarded an $85,000 grant drawn up by Mark Pracher with input from William Russell and I. Professor Craig Meyer was instrumental in initiating the meeting between the three of us which ultimately led to our grant proposal being approved by Congressman Brad Sherman.

Since then, our weather station has undergone major upgrades, including the addition of many new sensors never used before on campus and even a few that are rare for any co-op station in the country.

Since the late 1990s, the weather station's popularity has sky rocketed. I receive e-mails from all around the world from students, professors, businesses, government representatives and citizens. Information, graphics and animations on our website have been re-published by numerous entities all over the country and the world. Entities such as the United States Navy who has used our animations in meteorological training programs for their officers and soldiers, academic institutions in Europe, the southwest Asia and all over the Americas that have used our data in numerous peer-reviewed publications and undergraduate research, as well as a host of other organizations from the Los Angeles Fire Department to law firms in Beverly Hills.

Today our website receieves over 20,000 hits a month and continues to grow. What makes our data unique from most other weather stations is that our equipment has always had excellent rural exposure and have never been moved from their original positions which are key to ensuring consistent data.

We hope you find your visit to our website useful and educational. Thank you for your visit and we welcome you back, there'll always be something new here for you!
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