Mystery Creek, Alaska

Remote Automated Flammability Weather Station—approximately 28 miles ENE of Soldatna, AK on the Alaskan Kenai Peninsula

Station installed and maintained by the PNW Wildland Fire Sciences Lab (PWFSL), AirFire Team, Seattle WA (400 N 34^th Street, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98103. Phone 206-732-7800; web site www.airfire.org.

The weather station (removed in July 2007) operated daily from June, 2004 through July, 2007, collecting weather and moisture regimes on a year-round basis, especially during permafrost melt out and the ensuing fire season. Hourly data from the station is available here in Excel spreadsheet format or upon request from the PWFSL as a CSV text file (comma delimited ASCII text format). Owing to its remote location, this station was a manual download station. In order to make most appropriate use of the data, a few pictures of the station are included below:

Figure 1. Overall station tripod view with datalogger and weather sensors attached. Fuel and soil sensors are out of picture in foreground. Equipment on the tower includes enclosure at base, ATRH in 6-plate shield, solar panel, precipitation gage, wind speed sensor and cel phone Yagi antenna. Deep cycle 12 Volt batteries lie at base of tower.

Figure 2. Orange flags outline the location of the two soil moisture boxes after installation of the soil moisture and temperature sensors.

Figure 3. Tripod enclosure visible on tripod as well as back of solar panel and two deep cycle RV/marine batteries used to power the station. Note that bugs and visibility of laptop screen necessitated use of cover when programming and troubleshooting unit.