 |
| ||
 | |||
Cooperative Network Then and Now
A Comparison of Weather Stations 20 Years Ago With Today
Weather Observers in Chambersburg (left) and Stoystown, PA (right) in 1983
To see how the local climate and conditions of station have changed at particular NWS Co-Op stations since 1983, click on the links below.
New Spring 2004!!
Very few things remain constant for twenty years. In 1983, the population of the United States was 233,791,994, Ronald Reagan was President, the median household income was $20,885, and domestic first class stamps were 20 cents each. In the popular culture of 1983, Richard Attenborough's Gandhi was the best film, Michael Jackson's Thriller was the top album, and the Baltimore Orioles defeated the Philadelphia Phillies to win the World Series.*
Global and local climates also changes over the course of 20 years. The purpose of this project is to investigate the change in NWS Co-Op stations' surroundings and to analyze the impact of these changes in order to determine climate changes in local areas. Understanding accurately how climate changes through time is important because it helps meteorologists and climatologists produce better forecasts that in turn help people prepare for the upcoming weather.
In 1983, a graduate student in the Meteorology Department at Penn State, John G. W. Kelley, documented attributes of NWS Co-Op weather stations throughout Pennsylvania while completing his Master's thesis. We will use the information collected by Dr. Kelley as a basis to qualitatively estimate environmental changes that could have impacted weather observations from the stations. We will also quantitatively analyze the observered change of the seasonal climate of stations by graphing the actual observations over the last 20 years.
NWS Co-Op Station in Renovo, PA (1983)
*All facts provided by www.infoplease.com
|
||||||
