Weather Station Handbook: An Interagency Guide for Wildland Managers

Arnold I. Finklin
William C. Fischer

The overall purpose of this handbook is to aid personnel of the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service--and other federal, state, and private wildland resource agencies--in obtaining needed, reliable weather data. Such data must be accurate, complete, representative, and comparable between stations. Toward this, the handbook offers certain standards and procedures desiged to minimize sources of error and other problems affecting weather data. Specific attention is given to instrumental equipment--and its siting, installation, and maintenance--and operating (observational) practices.

This handbook is largely a revised, updated version of the Fire-Weather Observers Handbook by Fischer and Hardy (1976), with expanded content including unmanned, automated (automatic) weather stations. Details concerning remote automatic weather stations are in large part based on a BLM manual (CSDI BLM, RAWS Support Facility 1987). The BLM manual, revised by Robert McCormick and Buddy Adams, was written mainly by Phillip F. Sielaff in 1984. The content of the present handbook provides for a broad range of applications. The standards and procedures presented here are consistent with well established practices of meteorological organizations, hydrological services, and fire control agencies. Publications by the U.S. Department or Commerce (1972) and the World Meteorological Organization (1983) were among the primary contributing sources.

Table of Contents and Introduction (PDF 1.5MB)
Part 1 - Basic Considerations (PDF 1.7MB)
Part 2A - Manual Weather Stations: Measurements; Instruments (PDF 7.1MB)
Part 2B - Manual Weather Stations: Installation and Exposure of Equipment (PDF 3MB)
Part 2C - Manual Weather Stations: Observational Procedures (PDF 4.2MB)
Part 2D - Manual Weather Stat ions: Maintenance (PDF 6.7MB)
Part 3 - Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) and Remote Automatic Weather Stations (RAWS) (PDF 4.7MB)
References, Appendix, Index (PDF 8.2MB)

Weather Station Handbook - Complete (PDF 37MB)

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