UNIVERSITY PARK — While the Penn State Arboretum will always be a place for plant lovers, it may find a new following among weather wonks.
That’s because the University’s inviting garden with oaks, flowers and ornamental grasses is now also home to a high-tech weather system.
The system is the work of Edward Mansouri, a 1995 Penn State meteorology graduate and founder of WeatherSTEM, which develops interactive curriculum for K-12 classes. Mansouri donated the equipment, which he and Tricia Rizza, also with his company, installed on the rooftop and in a garden at the Arboretum Oct. 21 and 22.
“One of the goals is to find ways to engage students in science lessons by using real world data,” Mansouri said.
The system includes weather instrumentation that monitors for temperature, humidity and rainfall, and a camera that takes a picture of the sky each minute. The sky images are matched with the data collected, forming a sky video that provides a day of weather in 30 seconds.