394 Home Weather Station Basics

Show Transcript

394 Home Wx Station Basics TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred:

[0:00] Today, we have a wide-ranging conversation with climate scientist Daniel Swain of UCANR and WeatherWest. He joins us to discuss the vital connection between gardening and weather. Learn how to monitor vital conditions, understand microclimates, and how to set up your own weather station for the most accurate data. Plus, we discuss the impact of recent National Weather Service cuts on gardeners. Join us for an insightful conversation that empowers you to thrive during changing conditions! It's episode 394 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, “Home Weather Station Basics”. We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon jungle in suburban purgatory, and we're brought to you today by Dave Wilson Nursery. Let's go.

HOME WEATHER STATION BASICS Pt. 1

Farmer Fred:

If you're a longtime gardener, you just might be a weather nerd. You may want to know what's happening, especially around your garden area and greenhouse, about many things, such as what's the high temperature? What's the low temperature? What about humidity, wind, soil temperature, rainfall, evapotranspiration rate?

Plus, there’s chill hours, growing degree days, heat index, UV radiation, and a lot more that can be affecting you and your plants. And your meteorological equipment right now may be as simple as a thermometer hanging outside your kitchen window, which may not be the best idea. We'll have more about that in a minute. Or it could be as complex as a really nifty weather station that set you back $1,000 or $2,000 that sends a myriad of data to your computer or phone or your in-house monitor. So if you're considering upgrading your backyard weather equipment, you also need to consider the placement of those various devices in your yard to get more accurate readings about what is really happening in your garden area, especially near your food crops. And you know something else? That upgrade that you're thinking about with your weather equipment just might be a great move because of the recent cutbacks at the National Weather Service, where personnel and working hours have been slashed, including throughout a very wide swath of California.

Today, we're going to get some answers to those questions from Daniel Swain. If that name sounds familiar, you may know him as the man behind WeatherWest.com. He's a climate scientist focused on the dynamics and impacts of extreme events, including droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires. Daniel holds joint appointments as a climate scientist within the California Institute for Water Resources, which is part of the University of California Ag and Natural Resources, as well as the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. And he's a research fellow at the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research. He's an alumnus of Davis and Stanford, and he completed postdoctoral work at UCLA. And again, his Weather West blog is excellent reading wherever you might be on social media, especially Twitter, Blue Sky, and YouTube, where he does presentations all the time about upcoming weather events. I've been a fan of his for years. Daniel, I'm finally glad to be able to talk to you in person. Welcome to the Garden Basics podcast.

Daniel Swain:

[3:19] Yes, thanks for the invitation to be here today. It's great to be on the show.

Farmer Fred:

[3:22] All right.  I'd be curious about your own home weather setup. What's that like?

Daniel Swain:

[3:30] Ah, yes.  I actually am based physically in Boulder, Colorado these days because of that NCAR appointment, despite the primary one with the University of California. So we don't own a home here. So I'm somewhat limited when I can personally install on this side of the Rocky Mountains. But back in California, back when I was in high school, believe it or not, installed a weather station on my parents' home in the North Bay. And that is something that I have maintained over the years on their roof. It's still there. It still gets maintained. And I'm still trying to use, to the best extent possible, best practices for meteorological station sighting on that one.

Farmer Fred:

[4:12] I understand completely. I think when I bought my first large parcel of land, I got myself a Davis Instruments weather station, which was at the time one of the best you could buy. And that let me know a lot of things like wind direction, the high temperature, the low temperature, rainfall amounts, things like that. But it has gotten so much better over the last 20 or 30 years. And the data is much easier to comprehend as well because of either in-house monitors or the data is shot straight to your phone or your computer, it makes it a lot easier. But as they say in the computer world, garbage in, garbage out. So where you put that home station, no matter what kind it is, where you put it in your yard is very important, isn't it?

Daniel Swain:

[4:59] Oh, it's incredibly important. And this is actually something that I think is not always as obvious for a lot of folks as it might be to some meteorologists, although perhaps not even to all the meteorologists in the world who haven't worked a lot with actual physical instrumentation. And I think this is because, as you say, exactly where you put these devices and where they are relative to other things that might be in the immediate vicinity can make a huge difference into the numbers of the data you're actually seeing in front of you. And,  as you mentioned, there's any number of different companies that manufacture weather instrumentation or packages of weather stations.

Daniel Swain:

[5:42] For my part, just as was the case with you, the one I installed was indeed, I think it was one of the Davis Vantage Pro stations, sort of the best consumer grade ones that they offered for many years. And it's still there. It's still chugging along. It's been recalibrated a couple times over 20 years at the factory, but it is still the same original hardware from 20 years ago, and it's still going strong with that careful maintenance. But the bigger issue, I think, is indeed where we put it. And the main reason for this is think about what you're actually measuring, for example, with something as simple as a thermometer. You're measuring, technically, the temperature of a small increment of air immediately surrounding that thermometer device, whatever the device is. If it's an electronic one or an alcohol-based thermometer or a digital one, whatever the particular mechanism is, you're measuring the immediate environment of that thermometer, right?

Daniel Swain:

[6:46] So imagine two different scenarios, the same parcel of land, the same home,  two thermometers within, say, five feet of each other. So there's not really a meaningful meteorological difference between the temperature across those five feet under normal circumstances. So the numbers should be the same. But imagine that one of those thermometers is just sitting out there in direct sunlight.

Daniel Swain:

[7:11] You've mounted it on a pole above, say, a dirt field or a concrete or asphalt parking lot. That thermometer is going to read some awfully high values in the daytime and potentially some awfully low values in the nighttime. And that's because, of course, you have the sun when it's sunny is going to be directly shining on the thermometer, heating the thermometer itself because of the sunlight is actually landing on the device itself. It's also going to be warmer because you've put it in an environment that is itself a bit artificially warmer than it could be. You've got your own local heat island effect if you're near that parking lot or that dirt field because that sun is also heating the ground there more than it would if it were, say, grass or some other surface that weren't so solar radiation absorptive. So that thermometer is going to read a very high value on a hot day, say, you might even get a value of, 120, 130 degrees on that thermometer. And does that tell you that the ambient air temperature is actually 120, 130 degrees? Well, yes and no, because assuming the thermometer is correct, it is reading correctly the temperature of something in that environment.

Daniel Swain:

[8:35] But as we define the surface temperature, for example, whether we're talking about,  the temperature at two meter height, so right around the top of my head, since I'm a little over six feet tall, that's kind of a standard meteorological temperature measurement that's used, not just in science, but also for practical purposes and in agriculture and any number of applied purposes. That temperature is actually supposed to be a shade temperature. So the temperature of the air at about six feet off the ground where you don't have any direct sunlight. So if you're measuring a temperature, out in your dirt field or near the asphalt parking lot or in direct sun even, even if you're over grass or something, what you're measuring is something different than the number that you're actually comparing to everyone else's numbers. So when you go to the weather service website and get a temperature forecast or you look at observations from official weather service certified meteorological stations, the temperatures you're actually seeing are the two meter or the six foot height shade temperature.

Daniel Swain:

[9:44] And if you've put your thermometer in one of those settings we were just talking about, what you're measuring is something else entirely. You're measuring essentially however hot a thermometer gets if you put it in direct sunlight over a very absorptive surface. Likewise, at night, the opposite can happen, where those places get a bit colder than the two-meter temperature, correctly defined, because they tend to radiate a lot of that energy back out to space if it's a clear sky. And so you're going to get a colder surface than one that has a little less variability day to night. So you might read a bit too hot or maybe a lot too hot in the daytime and potentially too cold at night. So your range is wider than the actual range of the temperature that we might define officially. And this is just for one specific, simple atmospheric variable, right? We're just talking about the temperature. Things get even more complicated, and we start talking about things like precipitation or wind, and then things get just really, really complicated. We can dig into the details, but I just wanted to offer just how tricky it can be when we talk even about perhaps the simplest to measure atmospheric variable of temperature. And it's why, for example, when you look at the temperature on your car thermometer, you know, when you're out on a hot, sunny day or the bank thermometer, you might see it on the side of the road. Those will read values that might seem kind of patently ridiculous.

And the reason is those are often thermometers that are sitting there in the direct sunlight on someone's rooftop or in the case of your car thermometer, right on the hood of your car. And think about how uncomfortable it would be if you tried to put your hand on the hood of a car on a hot, sunny day in the Central Valley. It's a lot hotter than the air, I'll tell you that.

Farmer Fred:

[11:29] For gardeners who may have only invested in maybe a remote thermometer that they can read indoors, and those units are widely available even at the big box stores. They sell for $20, $30, $40 or so. A practical application that they're looking for is, well, how cold is it under my citrus trees? Do I need to put a frost cloth over them? Do I need to protect them in some way from temperatures? And if all you have is a thermometer, as I use in the example, outside your kitchen window, you're not getting an accurate temperature of what is happening out where your citrus trees are. So to protect that sensor, that thermometer sensor that is in your yard, would one strategy be to hang it six feet up in a citrus tree?

Daniel Swain:

[12:14] Well, I think, the key is it depends on what you're trying to measure. If you are trying to do, for example, frost or freeze protection, then it really does matter what the temperature is at the level of the plant that you're trying to protect. And,  in the example of a citrus tree, it could be very different. The height of where you're worried about,  frost on the leaves or blossoms or fruit of a tree, as opposed to like a ground crop or even something like vineyards, which are often below head height at their highest point. And you get what's known as a microclimate, especially in the vertical direction. So I mentioned that going five feet, six feet horizontally probably doesn't affect things very much most of the time.

Daniel Swain:

[13:04] But going five feet vertically actually can make a pretty big difference, particularly at night when you have what's known as a temperature inversion, when temperatures actually increase with height instead of decreasing as they normally do in the lowest layer of the atmosphere. Sometimes that inversion can be noticeably important even within the first few feet off the surface of the ground. And that can matter if you're talking about the top of a tomato plant or the top of your grapevines versus the top of a fruit tree or a nut tree or something.

Daniel Swain:

[13:44] So you sort of got to measure exactly what you need to know in that case. How high are you actually measuring? Is it under the canopy or is it on the top of the canopy? All of that can matter a lot for something as subtle as making sure you're not falling below a particular temperature threshold. Might it be good enough if you only need to get within a couple of degrees for your purpose,  in any of these locations? That might be fine. But if you really care which side of 32 degrees Fahrenheit that the temperature is at a particular height, you probably got to measure it as close to that height and location as you possibly can because you have these huge variations. In fact, a lot of the frost protection systems that are used in larger scale agricultural settings are really based on the knowledge that you do have these huge variations. Think about when people historically have used things as wild as helicopter downdraft, rotor downwash to sort of mix up the air during freeze events in orchards or fans or windmills that mix the air.

Daniel Swain:

[14:50] These aren't hundreds of thousands of feet tall towers that are doing the mixing. A lot of them are just a few tens of feet tall, and yet mixing the air from 30, 40 feet up to the ground can give you enough of a difference to prevent a freeze in a case where there's a huge difference between the very cold air right at ground level and the slightly less cold air 10, 20 feet up. So sometimes frost protection is even...Leveraging the fact that these vertical microclimates exist it's why you see vineyards for example on  steep slopes on some of the hills in in any place where you grow wine grapes part of that is because that cold air tends to kind of drain downhill into the the valley below or even the culverts and the rivulets below it doesn't even need to be a big valley. So even just planting on a slope that's you know five ten fifteen feet above the lowest point on the land gets you that extra degree or two of insulation. So a long way of saying that you got to measure what you actually want to measure. And if it's something as sensitive as frost or freeze protection, you got to pinpoint exactly the height and the location where you're trying to protect against that condition.

Farmer Fred:

[16:06] So if I'm a gardener listening to this, it sounds like, well, if I'm really concerned about frost protection for my citrus trees, I'd want to hang that sensor a little bit lower in the tree, maybe only two feet off the ground, but in the shade of the canopy. But at night, that's not that big of a concern, the shade from the sun. But there sure is a big difference if all you have is a thermometer hanging on the wall of your house outside. And what may be happening 10, 20, 30, 40 feet or more away in your yard where that tree is growing. In my own amateur experimentation with that, I've seen as much as a six to an eight degree difference where it's warmer on that thermometer near the house than it is actually out in the orchard.

Daniel Swain:

[16:51] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can believe it. Part of that,  it's, as we were talking about, there are genuine microclimates that can vary over that kind of distance. But it's also because your house, for example, might actually be warmer. Presumably, if it's a cold night, you have the heater on inside. And so some of that's going to bleed outside a little bit near your house if you have it hanging on a wall or an eave somewhere. Even a tree, for example, is going to exert perhaps a bit of a warming effect. Because if you have the thermometer under the leaf canopy, for example,  that leaf canopy itself is going to be both absorbing and radiating some of its own infrared wavelength energy that is keeping things a little bit warmer than it would be if it were just out in a bare dirt or an asphalt field with nothing above you, going out into the clear, cold winter sky at night with less moisture around too. This is where, whether or not you've irrigated. Most people who are farmers or gardeners know that once you put water in the soil, once you put water on the plants, once you irrigate,  you kind of dampen the range of temperatures that you're going to experience. So you have less hot afternoons because more of the sun's energy is going into evaporating water or water transpiring through the plant's leaves. But at night, even if you have less transpiration or evaporation, that water is still maintaining some thermal inertia in the tissues of the plant or in the soil because it has retained it from the daytime. And so it takes longer for damp soil, for example, to cool down than dry soil. So by having moisture in some places more than others, you're also going to actively, in some cases, create a temperature differential that's different than, you know, where you might be measuring at your house or out on the driveway or something else.

Farmer Fred:

[18:45] This is a tip we've passed along for years to people who are, who have an orchard or citrus trees or whatever, is basically a test that sensor out in various locations to see where perhaps the coldest temperature might be. What's nice is there are some inexpensive units that are available that will have multiple sensors that you can hook up to one indoor monitor that can tell you the various temperatures at various points in your yard. And that's not a bad plan for any gardener before they plant anything is figure out, A, where most of the sun is if you really truly do need full sun, and also where the coldest parts are. So I always advise people, before you plant a garden, live with your house, live with your yard for a year and notice where the sun goes, where the shade goes and where the temperatures go on a month-to-month basis before you do anything.

DAVE WILSON NURSERY

Farmer Fred:

[19:47] You want to start the backyard fruit and nut orchard of your dreams? But maybe you don't know where to begin. Or maybe you're currently growing fruit and nut trees and you've got a million questions, such as what are the tastiest fruits to grow? Where can I go to buy some of these delectable fruit and nut trees you've been reading about? And then how do you care for all of these trees, including planting, pruning, and harvesting? I've got one online stop in mind for you where all these questions you might have will get answered. It's DaveWilson.com. That's Dave Wilson Nursery, the nation's largest wholesaler of fruit and nut trees for the backyard garden. They have planting tips, taste test results, and links to nurseries in your area that carry Dave Wilson fruit trees. Click on the Home Garden tab at DaveWilson.com for all of these links, including a link to their years of informative videos about growing fruit and nut trees that they've posted on the Dave Wilson Nursery YouTube channel. Start the backyard orchard of your dreams at DaveWilson.com.

BEYOND THE GARDEN BASICS NEWSLETTER

Farmer Fred:

[20:52] When you pass a sign at the grocery store advertising vine-ripened tomatoes, What comes to your mind? Is it the image of a farmhand hard at work before sunrise, picking a red ripe tomato, sticking it on a conveyor belt, and that loads the tomatoes into a truck, which is sent to a warehouse, where another truck then delivers that red ripe tomato to your favorite grocery store, possibly the same day or the next day? Well, you better think again. That tomato was probably picked when it was mostly green. It sat in a building for a couple of weeks until it turned red, maybe sprayed with ethylene gas at some point to help speed up the color change. Did you also know that if you want to avoid sunburned tomatoes in your own garden during a heat wave, you can do something similar? It's all in the May 30th, 2025 edition of the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter entitled, “What is a Grocery Store Vine Ripened Tomato”? This newsletter edition is available now in its entirety for both free and paid subscribers. By the way, paid subscribers have added perks. We have a new Monday edition that's just for paid subscribers. Another benefit to Beyond the Garden Basics paid subscribers, you have complete access to the previous posts in the newsletter. There are now over 200 editions. By the way, your paid subscription to the newsletter supports not only the ongoing efforts to produce the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter, but it also helps keep the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast freely available each week wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more information about the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter in several places, including in today's show notes, at our homepage, gardenbasic.net or farmerfred.com or at Substack. And thank you for your support and encouragement to keep the good gardening conversation going.

HOME WEATHER STATION BASICS, Pt. 2

Farmer Fred:

[22:43] Let's get back to our conversation with climate scientist Daniel Swain about installing your own home weather system. I've noticed with people who buy, we'll say, the mid-range weather stations that have temperature, rainfall, and wind, a lot of these units, especially the wind part, is mounted on a rooftop. And I've often wondered, well, is that really accurate or not?

Daniel Swain:

[23:09] Well, when it comes to wind, you know, the answer is unfortunately often going to be a pretty flat no. It's not accurate. And there's a number of reasons for this. One is that, first of all, commercial-grade wind sensors are very finicky. There are different ways you can measure wind. Most familiar is probably the spinning cup anemometer. So all wind gauges are anemometers, by the way. That's the technical term. But the spinning cup variety, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's usually three plastic or metal cups that are sort of rotating along a vertical axis. And the stronger the wind, the faster the cups rotate. They're sort of like mini ice cream scoops that sort of get caught by the wind and spin faster, the stronger it gets. And that gets converted into a wind speed based on the number of rotations per unit time.

The tricky part with these is that  they're highly susceptible to getting dirty or to becoming degraded over time. So anything from spider webs to dust to bird droppings to just good old rust will really affect that kind of sensor really bias its wind speed kind of probably low so you're estimating winds that are too low relative to real winds and honestly some of the ones, especially the lower to mid-range ones that come straight out of the manufacturers from the warehouse, they already aren't doing so well. So there is a challenge here where it's actually pretty difficult to measure wind correctly, even if you've sighted the instrumentation correctly, because of the inherent challenges with getting that kind of physical instrument to operate and be fully calibrated correctly. Sometimes at the higher end of the consumer grade, as you get into professional-grade instrumentation, there are other forms of anemometers, of wind gauges, things like sonic anemometers, and those are becoming more common. Those are a little bit more resilient to that particular problem of friction, essentially, with the spinning cups, because there are no moving parts in a sonic anemometer.

Essentially, the instrument is actively sending out sound waves between receivers, and it's measuring the distortion of those sound waves between two relatively nearby points. So there are no moving parts. And if it's calibrated correctly, that can be a decent option because it's a little more impervious to things like, you know, you still got to clear the spiderweb off occasionally, but dust isn't going to affect it as much rust, you know, and there's no spinning wheel to spinning ball bearing situation that you have to worry about. So that can be, an improved option, although it's usually more expensive. That's not what you're getting on your typical consumer grade station But then there is the problem of sighting. Even the very best professional anemometer is going to be in error if you put it in the wrong place. And the wrong place, as you mentioned, it could be the roof line. Now, a lot of people put anemometers along the roof line because it's really just the most convenient spot. And I get it. Sometimes you do the best that you can. But the problem with putting it along the roof line is that if you have a gusty wind, for example, and you're measuring it along the edge of a surface, think about what happens if,  you were standing up on the roof on a windy, stormy day, you probably don't want to stand too close to the edge because you get buffeted by all of these gusts and these eddies, these swirling, turbulent features.

Because if you think about it, if the wind is hitting the side of your house,

Hopefully it's not going through your house unless you're inside of a tornado or something. Instead of going through your house it's hitting the side of the house and you know the the air has mass and it has force and it has to go somewhere so where does it go but it goes up once it hits the side of your house it can't go down to the ground it can't go through your house unless you have all the windows open hopefully not so it's going to go up and so now all of a sudden you've artificially generated wind in a different direction than the ambient wind you You have upward force of that wind, and as it approaches the edge of your roof, now all of a sudden there's no barrier anymore, and so it's going to start to move back in the direction that it wanted to go originally. It's going to go back horizontally, but now you're going from an upward wind to a 90-degree change to a horizontal wind again, and that induces rotation or swirls or random turbulent eddies.

So what I'm getting at is that if you have an anemometer mounted on the side of your house, whether or not it's a spinning cup or a sonic anemometer or something else, it's going to be really measuring all the turbulent eddies that your house produced rather than the ambient wind speed. And so you're going to be measuring, again, something other than what you actually want to measure. So ideally, what you do if you really want to know what the ambient winds are in a given location is you'd essentially mount your wind gauge, your anemometer, on a stick, on a post somewhere that's as far from vertical obstacles as you possibly can. So out, ideally, in an open field somewhere, and far enough above the surface that you're sort of getting away from the surface friction layer. So you want it to be, there's actually a formula based on the height of the nearby objects or vegetation. You want it to sort of be above that. But in general, you know, we often talk about 2 meter or 10 meter winds. 10 meters is kind of tall. That's like a 30 plus foot Tower. That is unrealistic for a lot of folks. But ideally, if you can mount it,  in an open field or,  even in an open lot, here there's less sensitivity than temperature, for example. So it's a little bit less of a problem if there's, you know, a paved surface or a dirt surface or water nearby, because you're not trying to measure the temperature necessarily, you're trying to measure the wind. And here, what you're trying to optimize is the radius around the sensor where there's no tall vertical obstacles that could induce artificial turbulence or either artificially enhance or reduce the ambient wind speed. So here, unlike thermometers where you're trying to minimize the unwanted solar radiation exposure or the exposure to anomalously damp or heated or artificially cooled areas, here you're trying to avoid proximity to tall objects that could cause eddies or reduce the speed of that wind. So the challenge is if you have one unit where these sensors are integrated into the same physical object, these can be kind of goals that are in opposition to each other. But ideally, what you might have are sensors that you can physically separate and potentially even put them in different locations, because it might be that optimizing for your most accurate sighting for your wind gauge is different than optimizing for your most accurate sighting for your thermometer, for example.

Farmer Fred:

[30:04] And for those gardeners with a nice chunk of land where they can accomplish that, probably their first thing they'll do is go to Amazon and see what's available. And there's a lot of those sonic wind measurement devices available at fairly reasonable prices in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands of dollars. And that sounds like a much more reliable way to measure the wind other than spinning cups.

Daniel Swain:

[30:28] Yeah, it certainly can be. It used to be the case that they were incredibly expensive, as you say, were the very cheapest ones from the thousands. But I think this is another place where technology has the technological curve mass adoption has made them a lot cheaper than they used to be. So they're still not trivially inexpensive, but they're also not nearly as financially out of reach as they once were, I think. So if I were, you know, if I were buying a new one right now, I would probably do just that and look for a sonic anemometer because they have, in general, you can imagine fewer moving parts, fewer problems.

Farmer Fred:

[31:01] Exactly. I think one reason why people may want their own home weather station now has been what's happening with the National Weather Service and their cutbacks, not only in personnel, but in hours of service. really. It used to be the National Weather Service Bureau would be manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Depending on where you live, that may not be true anymore. And you had a great little map the other day on social media about the areas where the National Weather Service has had these cutbacks. And one of the biggest swaths on that map was the Central Valley of California going from Bakersfield to Redding, which is, I think, is two or three National Weather Service bureaus, probably two, Sacramento and down in the center, down around the Fresno area.

Daniel Swain:

[31:51] Yeah, this is a bit of an extraordinary development, to be totally honest. As you say, for decades, the U.S. National Weather Service, which is a branch of NOAA, sort of the broader parent agency, which is within the Department of Commerce, which may surprise some folks, but that is where it is housed. And I think there are some good reasons for that, by the way, because, of course, the weather does really affect the economy, that's for sure. And it is advantageous to the economy to be able to predict it for any number of reasons. But in any case, what we've seen this year is a dramatic defunding of NOAA and the Weather Service and mass firing, Mass layoffs of large numbers of personnel as a result of pretty unprecedented shifts, apparently, in policy priorities. And the net effect of this is that there simply are not enough people anymore in the weather service, especially in some regions and local field offices, to do the critical duties that they're tasked with doing to protect life and property from extreme weather and to offer timely weather predictions. And so one particularly dramatic example, unfortunately, has sort of befallen the Central Valley of California, where, as you mentioned, both of the weather service field offices serving the valley. So the one in Hanford serving the San Joaquin Valley, and then the one in Sacramento serving, of course, the Sacramento Valley, but also collectively, by the way, these offices serve not only the entirety of the Central Valley, Sacramento and San Joaquin portions, but also All of the Sierra Nevada western slopes up to the crest, so, where most of the watersheds are, most of the trees are, most of the people are in the mountains, the northern mountains up to Shasta, and then the foothills ringing the entire Central Valley on all sides, including all the way out to the Carquinez Strait in the Delta, Lake County, you know, that's not even really part of the valley, that's definitely a different part of California, but that too is within the service territory, so it's an enormous region. In fact, I think it might even be a slight majority of the land area of California, including the state capital and all of its primary agricultural growing regions and its two largest watersheds. So it's a pretty big deal that these two offices are now so critically understaffed that they are not operating 24 hours a day. Now, to be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that there's no one at the wheel in the middle of the night. What's supposed to be happening is that adjacent offices in San Francisco Bay Area or in Reno or in Los Angeles are essentially taking over to cover in those overnight hours as is needed. The problem with that is that those offices, too, are now increasingly critically understaffed. They are working with their own skeleton crews.

And again, I've spoken with folks at these offices. I'm not going to name any names, but they are exhausted and demoralized by what's happening. And so they're trying their very best, and they are offering coverage at night for the offices that are no longer operating at night. But the challenge is going to be during an extreme weather episode, whether it's an extreme heat wave or an extreme fire weather or wildfire outbreak, or if this continues into winter, if it's a major flood event, for example, the problem is those offices that are offering cover on those overnight hours are likely to be affected by the very same events themselves. In other words, they're going to be busy dealing with their own stuff locally at home, and they too don't have enough people to fully manage the load. And so their concern, as well as my concern, is that the cracks that are now showing are going to become chasms during an extreme weather event. Potentially, that could be a real problem. If there are fire or flood warnings that need to go out where there simply aren't enough people, either to issue those warnings in a timely fashion or more realistically, to connect with the right people on the ground to do the right mitigation measures that need to happen, whether that's local offices of emergency service, Cal Fire, county sheriffs, the mayor of Sacramento, the Army Corps of Engineers, whoever it is in a given scenario, the point people for having those conversations are the very people who are no longer employed by the federal government through the weather service and who are no longer available at 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the morning if something were to arise in the middle of the night. That's sort of where we are now. And I'm hoping that there will be a course change, But that is the reality on the ground, you know, as we're having this conversation in late May.

Farmer Fred:

[36:42] And it isn't just the Central Valley of California, that map that you had that showed where there are cutbacks at National Weather Service bureaus. It looked like most of northern Alaska is now without service or has severe cutbacks in service, as well as places closer to you in Colorado and also over in where they've had some extreme weather lately in the Kentucky, Ohio region.

Daniel Swain:

[37:07] Yeah, this is a growing problem. As of right now, there are overnight weather service field office closures, as we were talking about, in both of the Central Valley offices in California, but also the Pendleton office that serves most of eastern Oregon, The Fairbanks, Alaska office, which, as you mentioned, serves not just the interior of Alaska, but the entire Alaskan Arctic. In fact everything about north of Denali National park. So really just this vast region of places where there's a lot of isolated communities where there's a lot of people who spend a lot time a lot of time out on the land you know fishing or hunting and who really do rely on these these these real-time predictions and then also as you mentioned in the middle the heart of tornado alley on the great plains during the heart of tornado season and then in portions of the east central U.S., Ohio River Valley, during the heart of flash flood season there. And there's growing concern that offices like Houston, Texas, for example, and in Louisiana are going to be critically understaffed during the peak of what will be their hurricane season along the Gulf Coast. So there's all sorts of specific reasons why this could be particularly consequential in specific places. But ultimately, the bigger picture is that there has been this very large, and I would characterize it as alarming shift away from the provision of these life-saving meteorological and extreme weather prediction services right now in this country in a way that I'm really concerned is going to hurt people and also hurt the economy.

Farmer Fred:

[38:40] I think, too, for gardeners, they will notice more and more of the monitoring stations that the National Weather Service uses are down and needing repair. And I'm wondering, well, who's going to repair if, for example, the Mather Air Base monitoring station needs repair, as it often does, and how long will that outage be? And that's going to drive a lot more people to installing their own home weather systems.

Daniel Swain:

[39:07] Yeah, I mean, this is another challenge. It's not just the meteorologists who have been fired, but it's also, you know, the radar technicians and the repair technicians who work both on the surface weather stations or maybe even more importantly, you know, these critical Doppler radar sites that are used for looking at thunderstorms and downpours and flood risk and also wildfires, which you can't replicate with your home weather station unless you got a few million dollars lying around and, you know, a hundred foot tower to mount it on. You're probably not going to have a home weather radar station, which are the ones that are operated by the weather service, funded by taxpayer dollars. And so,  when those go down, that's highly specialized equipment. And we were talking about the importance of minimizing your number of moving parts if you don't want breakdowns before in a different context. Well, the problem with weather radars is they're giant moving parts. It's a whole rotating object that's far larger than a human can manipulate on their own. You need a big heavy-duty equipment and cranes to fix things when they go wrong. So you can imagine the problem when we get rid of a lot of the people who were experts in fixing these things, and we also remove the ability of the weather service to pay for repairs, that once things go down right now, they're not going to come up quickly, and some of them might remain down indefinitely. So that's an additional problem. It's a personnel problem, which also cascades to an instrumentation problem. And for some of this, people may be more inclined to put weather stations on their own property, which you can do reasonably, and that can be helpful, and that can help fill a local gap. But then,  we talk about these weather radars, and that's a whole lot harder for you to fill on your own personal time and personal dime. And, weather satellites, for example, unless you've got an air base in your backyard that I'm not aware of, that's going to be a hard one to fix locally, too. So there's a range of solutions, some of which you can sort of mitigate locally. Others are going to be a lot harder to do so, you know, in this moment.

Farmer Fred:

[41:08] I would think that if people have a home weather station that also has some sort of forecasting ability, those forecasts are coming from the National Weather Service.

Daniel Swain:

[41:17] You know, it depends. Some of these are internet connected, in which case a lot of them probably are coming from the Weather Service. Certainly if you're using a smartphone, weather app, or really any website or television, all of that data is ultimately coming from NOAA, and a lot of it is indeed also coming from the Weather Service, if you believe it or not. There are some other stations that will try and offer you a prediction based on the trends and your local data that it's observing, but the reality is those are just so unreliable that I wouldn't suggest anybody takes them too seriously.

But I think that the bigger picture here is that there's a lot of folks who may not be aware that,  if you turn on the weather channel or if you go to your smartphone weather app or any wide number of agricultural specialized weather services that are out there, they provide valuable services. But those services are still predicated on the backbone of the weather service and of NOAA data that comes from the federally funded projects. All of these instrumentation networks, the underlying weather models, these huge systems of mathematical equations that are essentially giant software programs that we run on some of the largest supercomputers in the world. Well, it's NOAA that operates those supercomputers. It's NOAA that developed those predictive models in the first place. And it's also NOAA that provides all of the data from those predictive models and all those assimilated observations that it, too, Collects in the first place and gives it essentially for free to a lot of these companies who repackage it and reprocess it and turn it into the information that you're getting on your smartphone weather app or from the weather channel or from your specialized agricultural service. And so without NOAA, none of those other things can exist. And I've talked with a lot of people who operate those companies in the private sector, in the weather world, and they're all very concerned about where we're headed because they're concerned about the ability for them as companies who provide these services to be able to continue to do so because they don't have a means of generating all of this from scratch. They all rely in some form on NOAA and I think correctly recognize that NOAA is a critical prerequisite in this country for having reliable weather prediction, weather observation of all kinds.

Farmer Fred:

[43:43] Let's move on and talk about what you're going to be doing this afternoon. We're recording this on May the 23rd for playback  beginning on May the 30th. But as I mentioned in the beginning, Daniel Swain has a very vigorous social media presence, including YouTube, where he conducts regular chats. And you have a chat coming up later today that I'm sure will be up there no matter when people listen to this, that they can go to YouTube and listen to it. About the summer weather pattern that's descending not only on California, but on a lot of North America that's talking about record heat.

Daniel Swain:

[44:18] Yes, yes. As you mentioned, you may know me better as Weather West in general. It's my not-so-pseudonimminous online persona. I've had people shout on the street and from public transportation, not Daniel Swain, but Weather West, which is in itself a bit remarkable. But yes, in any case, I do host increasingly frequent, I call them virtual live weather and climate office hours on YouTube, on my YouTube channel. And they are open, not only open to the public, but they actually, there is a live chat feature and I do solicit questions live from participants. So you, yes, you, the listener, can potentially ask a question live during one of these sessions if you are so inclined. Today's, of course, realizing that this will come out after we've actually had the session, will indeed focus on sort of the climate outlook for this summer, which, spoiler alert, it's looking particularly hot once again across most of the West and most of the California interior with the possibility of having yet another record warm one.

Just to be clear, we are seeing a trend in that direction towards warmer and warmer summers and also warmer and warmer winters in California and beyond. But in general, in these sessions, you know, I'll try and talk about real time conditions. I'll also be talking about the short term heat wave that's probably coming up in the next week or so that might actually be occurring when this podcast comes out. But also the medium term, you know, looking forward to this summer, both in California and across North America. And then, as a climate scientist, as well as a meteorologist, I do talk about the big picture, the long term, what's happening over decades, and what is the context of what we're experiencing right now,  today, this week, this summer, this year, in the broader context of what, how things have changed over the last 30, 40, 50 years, and how they're probably going to change in the next 20, 30, 40 years. So if any of that sounds interesting, you can certainly find today's live stream, the recorded version of which, of all of these live streams, is available in perpetuity, recorded and therefore available on the channel, or also catch me on the next live stream. If you subscribe to the channel or you follow me on any of the social media channels, I always announce when I'm going to have them, usually at least a day in advance, sometimes longer, unless there's some urgent weather crisis And then I'll sort of pop on there with a little bit less notice.

Daniel Swain:

[46:49] But if you're interested, there's a number of ways to be alerted when I'm going to go live.

Farmer Fred:

[46:54] And again, on YouTube, it is Weather West, just as it is on all your social media outlets that you use, which is wonderful. And you have become America's meteorologist.

Daniel Swain:

[47:05] Well, you know, there may be some colleagues on the Weather Channel who would disagree with that one. Although I do occasionally, I sort of am a recurring guest on a Weather Channel segment called The Weather Geeks. And,  it's kind of full circle for me in the sense that I was that weather geek. I,  when we would be traveling and,  we get the cable television in motels all around the West on road trips, I turn on the Weather Channel and watch it. And now  I get to have some conversations on air with some of those very same people that I was watching myself,  30 plus years ago. So it's kind of a fascinating experience to sort of be enmeshed in the weather world day to day in this moment in particular. And then to have the opportunity, through my new role with UCANR, which I'm really excited about, by the way, to expand the scope of these conversations even more.

Farmer Fred:

[48:00] And we're glad you're there. At Weatherwest is where you can find him on Blue Sky, on X or Twitter,, as well as YouTube. He is now with the University of California Ag and Natural Resources as part of their California Institute for Water Resources. Daniel Swain, climate scientist. We've had a lot of great information today. And believe me, this is going to be very helpful for gardeners, especially when they start getting sunscald on their tomatoes and peppers this year.

Daniel Swain:

[48:29] Oh, yes. Well, hopefully it isn't too bad, but,  it's always best to be prepared. And so hopefully I can help folks out in that regard.

Farmer Fred:

[48:37] Daniel Swain, thank you so much.

Daniel Swain:

[48:39] Thanks again for having me.

Farmer Fred:

[48:46] Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Friday, and it's brought to you by Dave Wilson Nursery. Garden Basics is available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast, as well as an accurate transcript of the podcast, visit our website, GardenBasics.net. And thank you so much for listening and your support.