About Weather Stations
Weather is the single most important thing a farmer should know.
Buy a Weather Station
NEWA works with Onset Data Loggers and KestrelMet, which are configured for NEWA’s agricultural production tools. Visit our Buy a Weather Station page to contact vendors and understand the steps required for connecting with NEWA resources.
Partners
Fifteen US states are in the NEWA network. Your annual membership fee is covered in full if you live in one of these regions. Visit our Partners page to learn more.
Become a Partner
Not in the NEWA network? Visit our Become a Partner page for more information about state-level NEWA membership in your region.
Weather station sensors
Onset Data Loggers and KestrelMet configure their machines to include the required sensors for NEWA crop and IPM tools.
- Air temperature
- Relative humidity
- Precipitation
- Leaf wetness
- Solar radiation
- Windspeed and wind direction
- Soil temperature (optional)
- Soil moisture (optional)
If you own a weather station, visit our Placement Guide page to learn more about collecting accurate and unobstructed sensor data on your farm.
Maintaining your weather station is key. Visit our Maintenance Guide page to learn how to keep sensors and the weather station working properly.
Leaf wetness estimation
Leaf wetness is an important measurement for some NEWA models but airport locations and some other weather stations do not have these sensors. For these stations, NEWA uses average relative humidity greater than 90% to log a leaf wetness hour.
NEWA’s data quality control
Quality control methods are applied to sensor data coming from the weather stations linked with NEWA using a suite of protocols. These methods ensure datasets used by the NEWA crop and IPM tools are precise and accurate.
Station outage reports
The NEWA Help Desk notifies weather station owners by email when a data outage occurs. Messages are sent after outage periods of 24 hours, 7 days, and 21 days. The weather station is removed temporarily (status inactive) from the NEWA website after 21 days but is reinstated after the problem is fixed.
Weather station status reporting
NEWA State Coordinators receive a daily status summary of all NEWA weather stations in their state. This report lists stations reporting data; lists stations not reporting with a timestamp of the last reported data; and lists inactive stations not reporting for over 21 days. The State Coordinator can then follow up with station owners or make referrals to the NEWA Help Desk if needed.
Missing data
Temperature and relative humidity data points are missed occasionally in a data record and NEWA attempts to estimate missing values following a three-step process.
- The data record is examined for non-missing values before and after the missing data point and an average of the two is used.
- A sister station value is substituted if before and after values are unavailable (see below).
- If the sister station value is unavailable and the missing data are temperature or relative humidity, data from the National Weather Service Digital Forecast Database are used.
Precipitation and wind direction can only be substituted from a sister station. If sister station data are missing the missing value is left blank in rare instances.
Soil measurements are location dependent and are not substituted from sister stations in any scenario.
Sister stations
Weather stations occasionally experience short-term outages. But NEWA models require continuous data to provide accurate results and recommendations. For this reason, every weather station linked with NEWA is paired with a ‘sister station’ that is chosen by meteorologists at the Northeast Regional Climate Center, to provide required data during an outage.
Weather stations in the network
In addition to Onset Data Loggers and KestrelMet, NEWA collects data from various partner state mesonets (independent networks of stations) and airports. The mesonets perform their own data quality control. Some stations may lack leaf wetness sensors, thus NEWA estimates this as described above.
Airport station data handling
Relative humidity (RH) data recorded at airport weather stations are usually not representative of conditions in an agricultural setting. Therefore, RH values observed at airports are adjusted in an attempt to make them more applicable for agricultural applications. NWS RH forecast values are also adjusted in the same way for all locations. The formula used for these adjustments is: adjRH = RH / (0.0047*RH + 0.53). This can be expressed graphically as:
Get a Weather Station
NEWA is compatible with special configurations of Onset and KestrelMet weather instruments. See what your options are.
Have a question?
Reach out to our support center and ask questions to get support for NEWA tools, resources, and weather stations.
Become a Partner
NEWA is a partnership of land grant universities and grower associations. If you live in a partner state, you can buy a weather station for your farm and connect to NEWA.