Icy night

2011-03-10 16:42:56.000 – Steve Welsh,  IT Observer

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Well it looks like we have another bout of mixed precipitation heading our way very soon followed by rain tomorrow. From past experience we may well lose the radio link to the valley for a while as that wonderful freezing rain and sleet causes glaze ice to build up on everything. Please be aware that if we do lose our link then the current weather conditions and Mesonet pages will fail to update until the radio link is re-established.

So this is turning into an interesting shift from the get go. At the shift change meeting yesterday Stacey greeted me with ‘so have you heard that Mike has the flu?’ soon after this I learned that we were also down a volunteer for the week. The long shot is I’m working the night shift, which is always interesting and challenging for me since it is so different from my normal routine, after all I’m just an IT guy and not a Meteorologist, so having to work on checks, taking night observations (it’s so dark out there), annotating charts, creating the daily stats and preparing various radio shows is quite a challenge to say the least. Just trying to keep my eyes open at four in the morning is really difficult too. At least I’ll have some fun waking everyone up by hammering on the tower tonight – after all the ice has to come of for the sake of science – now I know why Ryan and Mike enjoy the night shift so much.

Steve Welsh,  IT Observer