I bought a copy of the 2004 Ithaca Weather Calendar yesterday at Ludgate Farms. I bought it partly because I'm perhaps a little too interested in weather, but also because it turned out to have a lot of Dryden pictures in it. Some are not exactly your typical pictures of Dryden, but weather stations here.
Given the area's many micro-climates, it might make sense to have more stations, but they do mention a cooperative one in Freeville. I also wonder how this interacts with the National Weather Service's very local forecasts.
Weather stations for Ithaca seem to have moved east over the years, from the Ithaca Academy downtown from 1828-53 to various Cornell campus buildings from 1874 to 1943, to Caldwell Field (east of the Vet school) from 1943-69, to the Game Farm Road station just barely in the Town of Dryden in 1969, as well as a Freeville site that began measuring precipitation in 1948 and a Mount Pleasant site that started in 1957. The October page of the calendar reports that Tompkins County Airport is still taking its readings manually, which seems odd to me.
The calendar is published by the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) and Cornell Atmospheric Sciences. The NRCC maintains an Ithaca Climate Page and publishes a monthly New York Climate.
Posted by simon at January 6, 2004 7:36 AM in weather