New campus weather station about to take OCC by storm

Predicting weather patterns is par for the course for geography students at Orange Coast College, who typically work from static maps when making prognostications in the introduction to weather and climate class or while working in the physical geography lab.

But a weather station installed in July outside the Costa Mesa campus’ new Literature and Languages Social Science building will soon be at the center of a new suite of lessons that will allow students to check weather conditions in real time, track changes and potentially communicate with other stations.

The professors working with the technology say they hope the device may also serve as OCC’s personal version of cable TV’s “Weather Channel,” providing up-to-the minute conditions — and someday perhaps a live weather camera feed — on the college’s homepage.

Manufactured by Bay Area-based Davis Instrument Corp., the Vantage Pro2 Plus can gauge outside temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed and direction, rainfall and UV and solar radiation.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“The reason we got this was because we wanted to coordinate with other departments and divisions on campus,” said geography professor Chris Quinn, who made the initial request. “We wanted to get it set up so an existing or future student can go on the website and look at all the live weather for Orange Coast College.”

Plans to bring such an instrument to OCC have been in the works since 2019 but were forestalled after instructors bought one wireless model and then had to return it for a wired assembly that worked better for the space. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and classes went remote.

“It’s been such an interesting ride,” Quinn said Tuesday.

But now, the physical apparatus is up and running, cranking out information instructors can view on a computer screen. Once they’ve finished linking the data to the software, they hope to soon be able to share readouts with students in the classroom, according to professor Jaime Speed, a colleague of Quinn’s in the geography department.

OCC geography professors Chris Quinn and Jaime Speed plan to use a newly installed weather station in their geography classes next semester.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“The idea is we can use it as a tool, collecting long-term data at our location and have students look at trends. We can also get data from other stations as well,” Speed said Wednesday. “I’d also like to get a camera installed so people can see the weather on campus.”

Manufactured by Bay Area-based Davis Instrument Corp., the device — a Vantage Pro2 Plus — retails for about $1,230 and comes loaded with features. The station transmits data to a sensor that provides real-time updates every 2.5 seconds, according to the company’s website.

It can gauge outside temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed and direction, rainfall and UV and solar radiation and has forecasting capabilities. The system’s onscreen graphing function provides more than 100 graphs for a 24-hour period or across days, months and years.

Speed is currently working on a curriculum her department hopes to roll out to students in time for second semester and has a vision that, in time, the station will help spur conversations about weather across campus and beyond.

“The weather — it’s universal,” she said. “Everybody cares about the weather and has got something to say about it.”

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