Midland County Emergency Management Office Network Added to the Synoptic Data Platform
The Enviroweather program at Michigan State University (Michigan’s Mesonet) is assisting the Midland County Office of Emergency Management to add and maintain a network of 20 precipitation monitoring stations in the Tittabawassee River Watershed in central Michigan. The precipitation monitoring station locations are distributed across Clare, Gladwin, Isabella, Mecosta, Midland, Ogemaw, Osceola and Roscommon Counties.
Keith Mason, coordinator of the Michigan State University Enviroweather program, shared, “This project was created in response to excessive rainfall that occurred in May 2020 and caused two dam breaches and widespread flooding in Midland, Michigan and surrounding areas. Support for this project comes from disaster relief funds that were granted to Midland County from the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to increase monitoring and data collection tools to assess real time rainfall and potential flooding risks within the Tittabawassee River Watershed.”
Precipitation, soil moisture and soil temperature data from the stations is automatically recorded, aggregated, and transmitted to Enviroweather’s database. From there, the data is ingested by Synoptic and displayed on the Data Viewer. Ultimately, Midland County will obtain the data through the Synoptic Weather API and share it with County Emergency Managers and other partners in the region so the real time data can be used for decision making.
Mason added, “In addition, several of the stations are in important agricultural areas that previously were not covered by the Enviroweather network, so Enviroweather was able to add air temperature, relative humidity and leaf wetness sensors to these stations to provide local data for weather-based crop and pest models through the Enviroweather website. The expanded coverage is an added benefit that this project provides to crop producers in this area of central Michigan.”
All twenty stations are installed and operational, and thirteen are currently available on the Synoptic Data Viewer and Weather API. Enviroweather hopes to connect the remaining stations to the Enviroweather database and the Synoptic Data Viewer before the end of 2024.
Special thanks to Keith Mason at Michigan State University for permission to share the details of the network and for working with Synoptic to bring it onto our real-time data platform.