ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – Dr. Robert Pasken has been a professor of meteorology at Saint Louis University since 1976. He has seen some amazing advances in technology, including the seamless weather network.
“If I’m going to worry about when thunderstorms happen in the St. Louis metro area, I need to know information about what the weather is like in St. Louis. Not the state of Missouri, not nationwide,” he said.
The seamless weather network (or “mesonet” for short) is a high-density, high-quality network of weather observing stations that Pasken and his students have been installing in strategic locations across the area, including right here at FOX 2 News in Maryland Heights.
“This is completely off the wall,” he said. “Just completely unique and different!”
These stations measure a variety of weather parameters, including temperatures, wind, and relative humidity. The goal is to paint the most complete picture possible of the current state of our atmosphere, not just at one of the local airports, but across the entire metro area.
“Everything is tuned to what the community needs,” Pasken said.
It’s not just about monitoring weather conditions right now. Data from these instruments is going into a hyper-local weather model back at SLU that is revealing weather features that are unique to St. Louis.
“…the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The Ozark Mountains. The river bluffs on the Illinois side. It’s a combination of all those things tied together with the weather itself to generate these unique wind patterns,” Pasken said.
Those patterns can influence everything from where thunderstorms develop to the movement and concentration of air pollution.
“There are weather flows, weather patterns just inside the City of St. Louis that are probably why the city is violating EPA air quality standards,” Pasken said.
