The Manitoba Agriculture Mesonet: Technical Overview

Abstract

AbstractEstablished primarily to improve weather monitoring across the agricultural regions of the province, the Manitoba Agriculture Weather Program (MAWP) began officially in 2005 with funding from the provincial government for the establishment of a network of 28 automated weather monitoring stations. The network steadily grew to 46 stations between 2007 and 2014 as a result of partnership with local commodity and research groups. In response to the Manitoba flood of 2011, more stations were installed and the network grew to 108 weather stations in 2019. The stations are solar powered, and scheduled maintenance is conducted at each station twice per year. Weather parameters monitored include air temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, relative humidity, soil moisture, soil temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, and wind direction using research-grade sensors. The observations are transmitted via cellular telemetry every 15 min in the spring, summer, and fall but hourly in the winter to conserve energy supply due to reduced daylight and below-freezing temperatures. The data can be viewed by the public within 1 min of data collection. The data are used to generate agronomic-related maps such as thermal unit computation of growing degree-days and corn heat units as well as disease risk maps such as Fusarium head blight. Beyond agriculture, the data have been used for aviation investigation and for undergraduate course instruction among other applications.