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RA Becomes WEATHERBUG School! |
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 Like a weathervane perched atop the highest point northwest of New York City, the Ridgefield Academy campus is the first to feel the effects of changes in weather. Need visual proof? Pick a day when you know a storm is brewing and scan the view from the flagpole; watch the sky change as the clouds make their way from the west to West Mountain. Need hard data? Ridgefield Academy is now an official WeatherBug school!
A WeatherBug weather ‘suite’ as it is officially called, has been installed on the rooftop of the Annex building, equipped to gather all kinds of information including temperature, wind chill, dew point, wind direction and speed, barometric pressure and relative humidity. The station will serve to enhance the science curriculum in all grades as students will now be able to collect long-term weather data and learn about live weather patterns here in the Northeast. Using Green Screen technology now available in The Bridge, students can also present Weather REports that may be streamed as podcasts onto the RA website.
WeatherBug, a brand of Earth Networks, operates the largest global weather network and boasts over 25 million online users every month. Founded in 1993, the company started in the education market by creating a program to include the installation of automated weather stations at schools to enhance math, science and geography curriculum. Since then, private businesses, government, the media, utility companies and agriculture departments to name a few are examples of some of the millions of daily WeatherBug users.
Two large LCD monitors, one in The Bridge and one in Deb LaSala’s US science lab, display information on all current weather conditions. “We hope to add a video camera soon that will serve much more than to just let folks remotely watch the sunset from the best view in Ridgefield. A videocam will allow people to see, in real time, what the weather is like on campus. It may be raining a mile away, but we can have a few inches of snow up here on the mountain,” says Joe Perry, Head of Middle and Upper School.
From their homes and on their way in to work, a videocam would allow RA’s Facilities crew to be prepared in advance for impending bad weather and to know what conditions to expect on campus roads and walkways, as it may be raining and 34 degrees elsewhere, but the Academy may be glazed with ice at just a couple degrees cooler.
Add the Ridgefield Academy WeatherBug site to your Bookmarks menu. Here, you will find current conditions plus charts of monthly weather data. Use the WeatherBug App (choose Ridgefield Academy as your destination) to get all updates from the road! Pass the info to anyone you know who would like the most current weather information in our region!
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