Vanessa Avina
Los Angeles was struck by a heat wave of 90-plus degree weather 19 days during the month of October, making it the second hottest October history, according to the Los Angeles Times.
According to the Los Angeles Pierce College Weather Station Web Site, the highest temperature of those days was 98.7 degrees and the lowest was 92.5 degrees.
Athletes on campus took special measures to keep cool, according to head football coach Efrain Martinez.
“Increase (the) water breaks. If a guy complains of something, go see the trainer,” Martinez said. “We don’t want to take chances if a player doesn’t seem OK or well.”
In 2007, October only had eight days of temperatures reaching 90 degrees or more.
“October is a warm month for us,” said William H. Russell, professor of meteorology and geography who also runs the weather station at Pierce.
The Pierce Weather Station was started by A. Lee Haines, professor of botany, who retired in 1971 after running the station for 22 years.
Russell started running the weather station in 1986 when he took over for James Vernon, who had run the station for 15 years.
The station’s data dates back 55 years, missing information only between Nov. 1 and Nov. 3 of 1960 because somebody tampered with the equipment.
There are two types of weather stations. The first one is a manual version which had been at Pierce since 1949 but now there is the Automated Weather Station, started by Russell and Steve Woodruff, Pierce College Weather Station Web Site creator.
Woodruff was a Pierce College student in 1997 and his professor was Russell.
“I was a student of Professor Russell’s back in 1997 when he asked me if I was interested in doing the daily observations at the weather station,” Woodruff said.
“I came up with the idea of installing an automated station at Pierce College during the summer of 1998 when I was working on creating the Web site that h¨¨as become one of the most popular weather station Web sites in the world since,” said Woodruff.
Before doing weather observations for the Pierce Weather Station, Woodruff has been involved in weather stations all over Southern California. He has worked for and under contract with the National Weather Service, Department of Defense, and California State University, Northridge.
The funding for the weather station was received in 2004. It cost $10,000 to build and to buy the equipment to the station. The project took only a week to raise the tower, install the sensors and put up the data logger.
Information the station gathers includes solar radiation, 20mm soil depth temperature, ambient and dew temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure and precipitation data.
“Most other stations are Davis stations which are lower quality stations prone to malfunction after only short service life. Our station is a Campbell Scientific Tower that is utilized by government agencies across the world,” Woodruff said.
“The reason I decided to come up with installing an automated station at Pierce was simple: to provide more up-to-the minute data to the public and private sectors.”
Data from the station, including 10-minute and 24-hour data, can be accessed at www.data.piercecollege.edu/weather.
(clockwise from left) Matt Elliot, 19, Adrian Janeway, 18, Lissa Blank, 17 and Stella Massachi, 19, take refuge from the hot afternoon sun at an umbrella covered table outside the Freudian Sip on Nov. 11. “Our winters are more like soft summers” said Elliot. ()