The Haverford Township Weather Station

The Haverford Weather Station (right), next to the Recreation and Environmental Center (left)

The Haverford Township Department of Parks and Recreation operates a "research grade" weather monitoring station just outside its Community Recreation and Environmental Center (CREC) building, in Andy Lewis Community Park at Haverford Reserve. The information box to the left summarizes the general conditions currently reported by this station.

The Haverford Weather Station is part of the environmental component of the Center and its activities. It provides public "near real-time" weather information that is actually measured in Haverford Township. Most media-reported, online, and smartphone "app" figures for neighborhood weather are averaged or interpolated from more-distant weather stations, typically at airports. They may not even be directly measured at all. For instance, the neighborhood rainfall amounts shown on television weather reports are derived from calculations made on radar data, not from the actual collection and measurement of rainwater.

The weather station equipment was originally bought in 2008 as part of a broad environmental and biological assessment of the former Haverford State Hospital grounds, now today's Haverford Reserve. It was originally installed at the northwest edge of "the Meadow" by Professor Don Barber and students from nearby Bryn Mawr College, who were part of the assessment team. Sometime around 2015 the station was relocated behind and below the building.

Volunteers from the Friends of Haverford Trails dismantled, reconditioned and revived the decade-old station in 2018, updating and reconfiguring it to focus exclusively on meteorological conditions. It now stands near the entrance to the CREC building parking lot, sited more optimally for weather factors such as rainfall and wind.

The tripod-mounted weather station consists of a combined datalogger and transmitter, to which a variety of sensors can be attached. Its present configuration includes the following components and capabilities:

• A combined temperature and humidity sensor, from which relative humidity and dew point can be determined.
• A barometric sensor, adjusted to Altimeter Pressure in inches of mercury (inHg).
• A wind speed and direction sensor, providing both wind and gust information in miles per hour.
• A solar radiation sensor, measuring total direct and atmosphere-reflected energy from the sun in watts per square meter.
• A rain gauge, measuring rainfall to the hundredth of an inch.

The station logs readings at five minute intervals and uploads this data every ten minutes to its host website for storage, interpretation and display. A small solar panel and battery keep it going.

You can see more data from this station, including trends and graphs, at its host website page:
www.hobolink.com/p/d9a40cfdc2f8ea26585af3802b12fb8b

Longer-term data files can be downloaded here in two formats (raw CSV file and Excel spreadsheet) for science projects and studies. Note that all times in these files are Eastern Time Zone, with adjustment for Daylight Savings Time.