Subject(s): Fire Weather Instrument
Title: Brainstorm: Fire Weather Instrument
Well, guess what? It’s Brainstorm time again on The Weather Notebook. Hi, I’m Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory. Today we have sort of an audio Brainstorm. Take a listen to a bit of my conversation here with Phil Perkins, who’s the Fire Management Officer at Yellowstone National Park, as we look at perhaps the most important weather instrument among the array of anemometers, thermometers, and the like. Your job will be to tell us what the instrument is:
Dave: "These are the most confounding things that I've seen as I walked out here. They basically look like little barbecue grill or something, but they're made out of wood. They're just sitting there on the ground."
Phil: "We have to replace them every 30 days and so I'm rotating the old ones now and set the new ones out yesterday. They look like little wooden dowel pegs that you might use in furniture construction. But they're a standardized unit. It's a foot above the ground."
That’s right; they sit about a foot off the ground, these four, one half-inch dowels about a foot long, attached so that they sit in parallel about half an inch apart. A simple hook is screwed in the end of one of the things, and there it sits. Right there.
Now the Brainstorm is: what is it? What does it do? What does one use this vital weather instrument for? And guess what? We have a clue for you. You can go to our webpage at weathernotebook.org and actually see a picture of the thing.
So if you have a theory, an explanation, or an answer, you can call our toll-free number and leave it on the machine. That’s 1-888-RAIN-001. That’s toll-free and you can leave your name and address, and we’ll send you a weather poster just for calling up, and a Weather Notebook mug if we use your answer on the air. You can also write to us at P.O. Box 2310 North Conway, NH 03860-2310.
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