From krehbiel@ibis.nmt.edu Wed Nov 3 23:15:53 1999 From: Paul Krehbiel Subject: Re: CSU-CHILL sites near Bethune To: pat@lab.chill.colostate.edu Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 16:07:23 -0700 (MST) Cc: ljmill@ncar.ucar.edu (L. Jay Miller) Pat: We did talk to a number of landowners, but none in the Bethune area. We figured we would wait and see where CHILL would go, and had plenty of work to line up other sites. There are a couple of ways to get started. First, the telephone book for Kit Carson County (where Bethune is) show maps of each township, indicating where the houses are and who lives in the houses. They also show land ownership. This is quite useful information; I would suggest you contact Llyle Barker at the NWS office in Goodland and have him fax you copies of the pertinent pages for the Bethune area. His number is 785-899-6412. The second thing is to find out who (if anyone) in the Bethune area are weather spotters. I have gotten that information from the Goodland NWS people (Kevin Lynott in particular) and have it plotted out on my laptop and can give you the names and locations of any people in the Bethune area. It would also be helpful to talk directly with Kevin Lynott; he knows many of the people and is quite helpful. The third way, which turned out to be the most useful for us, was that we figured out the approximate location we needed a station to be in, then we drove through the area and just stopped and talked with people in potentially good locations. We found everyone to be friendly; in our case we told people that we were going to be involved in a study of lightning in the area next summer and were looking for places to put a monitoring station, etc. In our case we needed a small amount of 110 VAC power and a location on relatively high ground, which we had usually spotted prior to talking to the people. We had no trouble lining up sites, the arrangement that we proposed was to pay $100 per month, for about 3 months. You will have a much bigger operation, obviously. We only drove through Bethune once, so I didn't size it up much. The question is whether you will want to be north or south of the town and of the interstate; you will probably want to look at sites in both locations. There are grain elevators in the town, and you will want to be far enough away from these to minimize blockage. We did see a CSU Ag station somewhere along the I-70 area between Burlington and the CO-KS border, as I recall. It is not in the right location for the radar, but it could be helpful to contact the people there. There is also an airport 3.8 miles south of Burlington on US 385 that has beautiful open space; it apparently is too close to Goodland to use as an actual site but it might be useful to take a look at it in any case for comparative purposes, if nothing else. The Goodland NWS has a nice weather site there, the airport manager's name is Larry Mack of Burlington Aviation; 719 346-5352. We have found the windows program Topo USA (from DeLorme) to be quite useful in siting stations. One can obtain profiles between sets of points, which we have needed for establishing our wireless communication links. In our web page (www.lightning.nmt.edu/nmt_lms/STEPS_lma.html) I have pictures of the topographic profiles between the approximate locations of CHILL, S-POL and Goodland Nexrad. It could be useful to chat briefly over the telephone before you go. My numbers are 505 835-5215 (office) and 505 835-0759 (home). I will probably be at home most of tomorrow working on a paper; I will also try to contact you. Paul Paul Krehbiel Voice : 505-835-5215 Physics Department FAX : 505-835-5707 New Mexico Tech email: krehbiel@ibis.nmt.edu Socorro, NM 87801