UNCA NC ECONet Weather Station

The UNC Asheville Department of Atmospheric Sciences owns, maintains, and operates a research-quality suite of meteorological instrumentation. Located near Lookout Observatory overlooking the French Broad River valley, the weather station collects a variety of atmospheric measurements to support undergraduate education, meteorological research, and local and regional interests. While the department processes the data internally, the weather station also contributes to the North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network (NC ECONet). The North Carolina State Climate Office, though a partnership with UNC Asheville, provides supplemental maintenance, support, and additional sensors for the site.

For questions related to the weather station, including sensors, data availability, quality assurance, maintenance, or large data requests, please contact Dr. Christopher Godfrey.

Data

The UNC Asheville Department of Atmospheric Sciences maintains a database of meteorological observations from the weather station beginning on December 3, 2018. Since then, the suite of measurements has gradually expanded with additional sensors, with the current configuration completed on January 2, 2021. All measurements at both 1-minute and 5-minute intervals have passed through rudimentary quality assurance algorithms. These data are available for retrieval and plotting from the links on the left. The State Climate Office has applied further quality assurance algorithms and summary measures to a subset of the available data for the UNCA Asheville Weather Tower (UNCA) NC ECONet station.

Plots

Create your own customized data plots, view current files, and retrieve past data files on our Daily Data Retrieval page.

Measurements

The following observations are available from the weather station at UNC Asheville at both 1-minute and 5-minute intervals. Please see the data description page for details on each measurement.

• Air temperature (2 levels)
• Relative humidity
• Wind speed (5 levels)
• Wind direction (2 levels)
• Barometric pressure
• Solar radiation
• Photosynthetically active radiation
• Leaf wetness
• Precipitation
• Soil temperature
• Soil moisture
• Black globe temperature