Sparta School heralds new weather station

Sparta Elementary School and the local community got to welcome in two important new things in a ceremony held at the school on the morning of Feb. 14.

The school is where Alleghany County's Mountaineer Millenium II program is housed. Some 85 students in grades four through eight participate in the program, and through those students' work with Appalachian State University professor Ray Russell, the school recently got its new weather station. The new station is capable of recording from one of the school's classrooms, and sending to spartaweather.com information about the weather here in Alleghany County. In honor of the station's placement, a groundbreaking ceremony was held at SES on Feb. 14. The weather station is one of only 15 like it in existence, and is one of eight such stations in the northwestern North Carolina region.

"The weather station is capable of measuring such variables as temperature, wind direction and speed, humidity, barometric pressure, and others," Russell explained. "And from those, you can compute all sorts of other things — such as the windchill factor, which is a combination of the speed and temperature of the wind. The data collected by (Sparta Elementary School's) outdoor weather station is transmitted, wirelessly, into an indoor part of the station, which is a computer in one of the school's classrooms. From there, the data, or information, is transmitted to our website (spartaweather.com) every 10 minutes."

He said that at first, a number of county-specific websites were created, including booneweather.com, averyweather.com, spartaweather.com for this county, and others. He said that the comprehensive website named raysweather.com was then created to cover weather in a larger area. There is currently not a Sparta weather map at raysweather.com, although Russell said that one is in the works and should be up and running in the near future.

A second new welcome was that for 11 AmeriCorps students who will be working with the Mountaineer Millenium students through the first week of April.

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