Maryland Mesonet

The Maryland Mesonet's mission is to design, build, and operate a network of high-quality, closely spaced, rapid-sampling weather monitoring and data collection systems across the state to advance emergency preparedness, the accuracy of regional weather forecasts, and expedite disaster assessment and recovery.

Each mesonet site will measure air temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, rainfall, snow depth, and soil moisture and temperature at five depths, most at 1-minute intervals. The measurements are sent to data servers at the University of Maryland using cellular transmission. The automatic quality-controlled observations are transmitted in near real-time to the National Weather Service and simultaneously available to emergency management personnel and Maryland citizens from the Mesonet website.

Mesonet data will advance community risk assessment and emergency preparedness for impending extreme weather, improve regional weather forecasts by providing more accurate initial states for prediction models, and expedite post-event analysis for disaster declaration and recovery.