The Vanderhoof high school installed a weather station on the roof that the students and staff are excited about.
The station is accessible through a number of websites and even has an app available for your phone on the Weather Underground website.
The Davis weather station costs about $500 retail which places it in the middle of high and low end electronic weather stations. It even has a sort of cup on top to measure precipitation but only when it rains. It would need a lot more power if it was going to melt the snow and measure how much of that fell.
The device needs no maintenance, it runs off solar and wind energy and is mounted onto existing structures on top of the school. Extremely low temperatures aren't an issue for the device but a high wind could be threatening.
The station was sent to NVSS from a collaboration of UNBC and the Oceanographic Society. According to NVSS teacher Dale Horita, the collaboration had some money left over to fund weather stations for schools.
UNBC also runs a site with the latest NVSS weather for their own research purposes.
So all NVSS had to do was get it working. Which is where Horita comes in.
Horita spend several hours getting the station working. And longer in setting up the equipment to read and record the information collected by the station.
"I teach info tech and I'm a geek so I like this kind of stuff," said Horita. "These are so cool, they really are. The kids can see the temperature and we're starting to talk about it in classes."
Horita had a station at home for a bit, not as pricy as this one and it got destroyed when a high wind came.
"Just shattered it," he said.
Horita said students are checking the site every day. Students were the first to notice when the unit needed to be restarted when it wasn't working correctly. Horita is excited to be working with this equipment and loves messing with the data in the classroom.