Heather Latter
The northwest corner of the field at Fort Frances High School will house a new structure this spring.
The Ministry of Natural Resources will be installing a new weather station there that will benefit both parties.
“We had a weather station at the school in Mine Centre so had worked with the [Rainy River District] school board previously and thought it would be a good opportunity to revive that relationship,” noted local Fire Operations Supervisor Mike Pistilli.
“And I’m always looking for opportunities to reach out to community partners,” he added.
“I’m heavily involved with instructing within the fire program so I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to work with the kids at the high school, too.”
There currently are 10 weather stations within the administrative boundaries of the MNR’s Fort Frances District, including one located on the roof of the MNR office here in town.
“It’s an older technology,” Pistilli said, noting the new weather station at Fort High will be upgraded to a higher technology that communicates with the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) that’s run by NASA.
“Right now we manually have to look at the weather and input it into our computer program,” he explained.
“The new weather station is just done automatically and done hourly. So it saves us a lot of time.
“But there just isn’t enough room at this site to put the new-style weather station,” Pistilli added, noting it takes up about a 20’x20’ space.
“We generally try to go to municipal airports because it’s a nice big open area,” he remarked.
“But there’s a 30-foot tower with these weather stations, and so the regulations with towers needing to have lights and be painted because of aircrafts coming in at the airport is just a pain for us.”.
That’s when the MNR decided to approach the high school to see if it would be willing to allocate some space on the field for a weather station.
“We met with them back in January and agreed it would be great,” said Travis Enge, manager of plant operations and maintenance for the local public school board.
“It’s solar-powered but will be connected to the Internet so the students will be able to collect real time data,” he noted.
“It should be really useful for environmental education.”
While the details have yet to be worked out, Pistilli said he’s thrilled the weather station will be a benefit to high school students as well as the MNR.
“I was hoping it wouldn’t be one-sided for MNR,” he remarked.
He noted there will be weather consoles displaying the real time temperature, wind speed, and humidity from the weather station that students will be able to access.
“It logs that data over time, too, so they would be able to look at the monthly rainfall, etc,” Pistilli added.
“Also with the weather stations, you can link into a webpage, kind of like The Weather Network, where it would say Fort Frances High School and what the temperature, wind, and humidity was at the time.
“So they are interested in putting that on their website, which I think is kind of neat,” he said.
Pistilli also is committed to going in to talk to the students about weather, as well as how it affects fire behaviour and the fire program.
“I would also like to talk a little about fire ecology, just given that the forest industry is still relevant in the area and forest and fire ecology is something I am passionate about,” he enthused.
“So I’d like to get that information to the kids.”
He added the students also will learn to take weather readings themselves.
“We’re going to teach them how to do it manually, like we used to in the old days before we had these automatic weather stations,” Pistilli explained.
“And they will learn about tracking weather over time and how that ties into climate.”
Pistilli said getting accurate data is important for the MNR when it comes to fire management.
“On any given day, twice a day, we collect temperature, the relative humidity, rainfall, and the wind speed,” he noting, adding this information then is inputted into the fire weather indexing system.
“It comes up with a bunch of numbers to tell us how wet or dry forest fuels are,” Pistilli explained.
“Based on how wet or dry they are, we can get an idea of how well they would burn and come up with a hazard rating.
“So those are on the signs that you see with low, moderate, high, [and] extreme on them.”
Pistilli said the data from the weather stations also can help determine how many crews or helicopters are needed, as well as where to station the crews.
“We try to be prepared three days in advance,” he remarked, noting most of the summer months are spent pouring over weather data to make the best decisions.
While the new weather station won’t be able to read snow depth, that’s something they hope to work towards.
“I’d like to use it to figure out snow plowing costs,” Enge chuckled.
In the meantime, they’ll have to wait until the ground thaws before the weather station can be installed at Fort High.
“So it’s likely going to happen sometime in May,” Pistilli said. “That will give a month or so for the students to at least get familiar with it before the end of the school year this year.
“I think it’s going to be a good partnership,” Enge agreed.
“I’m looking forward to it,” echoed Pistilli.
