Menstrie Community Resilience Group launches weather station
One of our successful seed grants was for a weather station in Menstrie. MCRG Primary Coordinator James Bull sent us his comments:
“In Menstrie the community council runs a community resilience team. This team of volunteers is poised to inform, update and assist the community if a major incident occurs within our village. Part of being ready is to have data at hand that can help us determine if a wet weather event could impact our flash flooding burn. Weather forecasts can predict what is likely to happen, but without knowing that day’s accumulating rain and the strength of the rain now, we can’t easily react in a proactive way to the forecast. This weather station, which just went live to the community today (20th March) has been collecting a week’s worth of data as we bedded it in. Like anything else the group and the community could suffer from issue fatigue, so we want to only take positive actions when the local data shows an event is likely, rather than just when the generic Floodline messages are released. This empowers the community.”
Data will be viewable on the Met Office’s WOW platform here:
“We aim to use historic data over time to collate a very local micro-climate view to see if climate change is making a difference to us.
“We are also working with TCV and the local primary school as part of Citizen Science, in discussing how physical geography impacts on human geography and vice versa as the climate changes. We are asking the students to keep a journal using data from our burn level monitoring tool and to try and correlate it with this new weather station data. A wee hint – they don’t always correlate as it depends where in the catchment system the rain falls.
“We are hugely grateful to FEL and the Scottish Government for funding of this new tool in our toolkit and to add to the national Climate Hub.”
The Menstrie Community Resilience Group is pictured here in 2020 responding to Storm Dennis. What a hardy bunch!
