Watching weather like a hawk

Myriad uses for portable weather stations

Gasparilla Island is linked to western Florida through a 2-mile road that sports three bridges, including a nearly five-decades-old swing bridge that pivots in the middle to allow boat traffic to pass.

But the concrete and steel structures are susceptible to wind. With breezes of 20 mph, warning flags are posted to alert small watercraft of potential danger. At 40 mph, operators keep the swing bridge stays locked in place. At 55 mph, tenders are evacuated from the bridge house, if they haven't left already as a hurricane bears down.

"We have to know what the wind is doing so that we'll know what do with the bridge," said Jim Cooper, executive director of the Gasparilla Island Bridge Authority.

And it's a product made in Logan that lets people know just when to implement those actions. WeatherHawk's small, portable but data-pumping weather station at the bridgehouse keeps bridge minders precisely apprised of weather conditions.

"This provides better information and more specific and more reliable information than we've had before. We're getting updates every minute, and it's a highly calibrated system. The other system we had before just wasn't as good," Cooper said.

"We don't have to worry about tornadoes here, and with more satellite imagery available all the time, we get early warnings about hurricanes. But this (station) is another dimension we didn't have before to add to the picture."

WeatherHawk, a division of Logan-based CSI, has been around for a little more than a year but already has found that its weather stations have plenty of applications — bridge or no bridge.

The stations are very small but provide detailed data: air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, solar radiation, wind direction and wind speed. An on-board microprocessor measures the sensors and stores the data before transmitting it to a remote PC.

"Anybody can go on the Internet right now and get several weather stations for generalized weather data, or they can go to weather.com, but those aren't from stations at a specific point," said WeatherHawk product manager John Johnston.

"And keep in mind that you can get very different data even just two miles away. Any situation where you have a need for detailed, instantaneous weather information, the only place you'll get it is a weather station. And that's really our niche."

WeatherHawk has found customers in education, home, leisure and recreation and other markets.

Some of the weather stations are used by schools to teach students about weather and weather patterns, which can be related to national and global climate, which can be related to bird migration and plant growth, Johnston said.

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