DENVER — For the first time in more than 30 years, the City of Denver now has a second official weather recording site.
It's located at the Urban Farms property in Central Park, on the grounds of the old Stapleton Airport location. Local weather forecasters say it's a big deal, since it now allows them to get better weather data closer to the city.
We all know Denver weather can change in just a matter of minutes. And the weather you see in one area can be totally different from the weather we see just a short distance away. For example, a phenomenon known as a "backdoor" cold front could hit DIA with wind, cold and snow hours before it gets to downtown Denver.
Heavy precipitation often impacts areas closer to the mountains much more than it does areas out east of downtown.
Denver area forecasters say the city has been lacking a set of highly accurate downtown observations since the closing of the Stapleton Airport observation site in the early 1990's.
That's when Denver's official weather recording site was moved to its current site, at Denver International Airport, which is 23 miles northeast of Downtown.
Since that time, observation networks for the fast-growing Mile High City have consisted of a ring of reports from the suburbs, with not much reliable data from the city itself. But the new site, called the Campbell Weather Observation Site in the Central Park area of Denver, is changing that.
"What we are doing to do is reestablish six decades of weather data to the exact spot where it was taken," said Denver7 Chief Meteorologist Mike Nelson, who was instrumental in getting the new site up and running. "That's important because we are reconnecting that climate data as the climate is getting warmer with the original observations taken with the original Stapleton Airport for 60 years.”
The Campbell weather station was built through a partnership between Denver7, the National Weather Service in Boulder, the City of Denver and Urban Farms. It took several years and about $30,000 in fundraising money to make it a reality.
"A ten-mile difference along the Front Range between what happens here and what happens out in the northeast is a huge difference," said Nelson. "Now we will be able to show not only the observations at the airport, but the exact same observations, temperature, humidity, wind, pressure, and precipitation right here in the city.”
The new site is creating a lot of excitement with Meteorologists at the National Weather Service Office in Boulder.
"We have a real time, extremely high-quality observation for the city of Denver," said Paul Schlatter, Science and Operations Officer with the National Weather Service Office in Boulder. "It's 12 miles from DIA and much more centrally located to the weather conditions experienced by 95 percent of the residents in Denver.”
DIA will still be the official weather recording site for Denver. And local weather forecasters are hoping the new site will help fill in the missing link when it comes to climate information for the city.
