The Wrack: swmp

So looks as if we got a bit "lucky" and missed the brunt of Hurricane Irene as the storm passed to our west dropping large amounts of rain on western New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts and Vermont. Here are some totals from our System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) weather station behind the Coastal Ecology Center.

With the impressive amounts of rain in the last month or so, and some unusually warm temperatures in March and early April, I thought I would share some of the more interesting weather trends we recorded through our System Wide Monitoring Program here at the reserve. March was the wettest and warmest on record for the state of Maine!

Hello again,

Well another strong storm system battered the Maine coast again this past weekend. Here is a brief synopsis of that storm data courtesy of the System Wide Monitoring Program.

All data from 3/13 at 11pm to 3/15 at 3pm was collected on the SWMP Meteorological Station located behind the Coastal Ecology Center.

We had 6.7 inches of rain fall between late Saturday night (13th) into mid afternoon on Monday the 15th. The bulk of the rain (4.7 inches) fell on Sunday the 14th.

We had a max wind gust of 50mph here at the farm. Our average wind speed was 12mph but we had regular gusts between 20-40 mph.

Shaping up to be a wet and windy spring if this keeps up!

Whew! Nothing like some February rain showers huh? It's been a "weird" winter for lack of a more "technical" term.....

Here are some numbers from the most recent "Blast" that occured Thursday Feb 25 through early morning of February 26th 2010. (All data was collected on the SWMP Meteorological Station behind the Maine Coastal Ecology Center.)

Near real time weather data for the Wells Reserve is now available. Give it a try!

The station, located behind the Coastal Ecology Center, has a National Weather Service identifier and is checked and serviced monthly by the reserve's SWMP Tech, Jeremy Miller. The data is considered provisional, but goes through an automated quality assurance and control procedure before it is posted.

The System Wide Monitoring Program coordinates with the Centralized Data Management Office, a NOAA entity in South Carolina. The CDMO website lets you graph or download weather data, plus water quality data, from Wells and all other reserves in the system.

May’s flooding washed away two of the Reserve’s water data-logger units used for the System-Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP). Replacing the units was well timed, though, as equipment upgrades now allow public access to “real-time” data on weather and water quality.

Too many nutrients can cause more algae growth than an estuary can support. Excess algae leads to decreased oxygen in the water and other symptoms that if left unchecked can completely devastate a marsh. This process is known as eutrophication. Scientists are now developing a tool to help address eutrophication in estuaries.

The Wells Reserve is collaborating with NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) to determine the extent of eutrophication in five northeastern reserves.

The NERR system just released a 10th anniversary report on the activities, achievements, and growth of the System-Wide Monitoring Program. You can download the PDF at the NERRS website.

You can learn more about the program by following the links under Monitoring on that site.

Visit our Monitoring page for a SWMP overview and some more related links.