«For a municipality that lives off tourism, meteorological information is essential», says Bruno Gonçalves, environmental engineer at the Lagoa City Council and responsible for the two meteorological stations of the MeteoFontes municipal project.
“Residents, tourists who are here or want to come here, maritime-tourist boats, fisheries, everyone can use the data from our stations in their activities. These data are also a good promotion for tourism, because anyone, anywhere in the world, can get to know the weather conditions in Lagoa, simply by accessing the data we make available on the internet», added this amateur meteorologist, who he confesses to having a real "passion since he was a kid" for the phenomena of weather and climate.
To complete the network of Meteophons project, last Monday, the 23rd of June, the second meteorological station, the Coastal MeteoFonts.
The first season, which gave rise to the MeteoFontes project, was installed in 2009 in the Municipal Park of Sítio das Fontes, near Estômbar, in the interior of the county.
Lagoa is, therefore, the only municipality in the Algarve to provide its residents, tourists, companies and even researchers with data on the current weather and daily weather forecasts, updated in the morning.
In fact, the primary school in Carvoeiro, located on the promontory next to the beach, where the chapel and fort of Nossa Senhora da Encarnação stand, already had a meteorological station, «donated by the University of Algarve», but this winter « it broke down, perhaps due to an electrical discharge during the storms», Bruno Gonçalves told Sul Informação.
It was therefore necessary to buy new equipment, which went into operation in May and was officially inaugurated last Monday. The new station cost around 2000 euros, but the installation work, on the server and on the MeteoFontes website, was all done by house silver.
Weather data useful for society
The municipality of Lagoa is not very large, but the data provided by the MeteoFontes network indicate that the weather conditions are quite different, between the interior and the coast, despite the short distance of less than six kilometers between the stations of Sítio das Fontes and of Carvoeiro. On the day the report of the Sul Informação visited the new station, last Tuesday, at 10:00 am, on the coast the temperature was 19ºC, while in the interior it reached close to 24ºC.
«At Fontes we already have data since 2009, which indicate that there is a microclimate here, with warmer temperatures in the highs and lower in the lows than the normal for Faro, while on the coast the temperatures are similar to the normal for Faro, explains Bruno Gonçalves.
In addition to being able to serve residents, tourists and companies, the data from the MeteoFontes project they can even be useful even for spatial planning tasks, explains the environmental engineer.
“Knowing what amounts of rainfall cause floods and where they cause them may have implications for land use planning and management,” he exemplifies.
But the MeteoFontes project is also an important instrument in the environmental education strategy promoted in the Municipal Park of Sítio das Fontes. Visitors, mostly students from schools in the county and the rest of the region, can not only learn how a weather station works and what it is for, as well as what data can be obtained, the characteristics of the climate and the weather. For Bruno Gonçalves, who fell in love with meteorology «as a kid, maybe when he saw thunderstorms», the educational aspect of the project is very important.
Amateur weather stations in the Algarve
Across the country there are close to two hundred amateur weather stations, of which about a dozen are located in the Algarve – the two in MeteoFontes, and also in Algoz, Almancil, Albufeira, Aljezur, Lagos, Quarteira and Portimão (in Manuel Teixeira Gomes Secondary School).
Most of them are operated by individuals who are interested in the topic or by schools. Therefore, Lagoa is the only Municipal Council to operate two meteorological stations, whose data is made available on the internet for public use, although one was installed a few years ago by the Loulé Council, in the city's Environmental Park, but it is still working. , never made your data available to the public.
Bruno Gonçalves, who is also one of the founders of Troposfera – Portuguese Association of Amateur Meteorology, created in April, revealed to Sul Informação that one of the projects of the new association is “to establish a network of amateur stations certified by the IPMA”, the Portuguese Institute of the Sea and Atmosphere, which is the official Portuguese entity in the field of meteorology. MeteoFontes stations are already at the forefront of this certification, he added.
webcam for watch the sea
But MeteoFontes' projects are not limited to the two stations already in operation. "In the short or medium term", the objective is to install a webcam (a video camera that makes its images available online, in real time), facing the sea, in Carvoeiro.
Once again, this will be useful for residents, tourists and companies, who will be able to know at all times the state of the sea, through a simple look at the MeteoFontes website, but it can also help in situations of extreme weather phenomena, if not to take preventive measures, at least to collect data about what is going on.
«If we already had this webcam installed, on tornado day we had been able to see him approaching and maybe we could have done something, like notifying the authorities, for example», said Bruno Gonçalves.
A webcam it will be facing south, not only because that is where the sea is located, but also because it is necessary to «monitor what comes from the south, which are the most adverse conditions». Last winter, if the camera had already been installed, the giant waves that caused extensive damage on the beach and off Carvoeiro.
The projects of MeteoFontes, however, go even further, although some of the initiatives are not to be implemented immediately. “It would be good to complement the project with the installation of a ray detector. There is a European network, the blitzortung, which in Portugal has only six detectors, installed by private individuals. It takes eight for a greater degree of detection. This network would be to complement the IPMA network (which has three detectors, I think)», says the amateur meteorologist.
And what is a ray detector network for? «To make available in real time the atmospheric discharges that occur». Yes, and then what is it for? In addition to the scientific interest, Bruno Gonçalves points out that, in practical terms, «it may be of interest for some activities, such as golf, for example. Golfers are among the people who are most affected by lightning, often causing their death». If it is known that a storm with many lightning and flashes is approaching, at least golfers on the courses in the Lagoa area can be warned in time.
By the way, click here and find out what time it is today, according to MeteoFontes.
Comments