Real Time Weather Data for French Researchers in Antarctica

Look what arrived at the end of the world: a Vantage Pro2. Used with permission.

If the summer heat gets to you, you might get a cooling feeling by checking out this weather data.

Asso Infoclimat, a French non-profit association of "passionate meteorology enthusiasts," boasts a network of over 500 weather stations across France. But recently, that network has extended much further: all the way to Antarctica.

Asso Infoclimat member and Météo-France meteorologist François Gourand took a Vantage Pro2 weather station to the Dumont d'Urville research station at Adélie Land, Antarctica. (If you saw the movie, The March of the Penguins, you know the spot. It’s famous for its colonies of Adélie penguins.)

The Vantage Pro2 was installed in partnership with the French Polar Institute Paul-Emile Victor, a joint scientific research agency that manages this station and five others in the Arctic and Antarctica.

Researchers have always had a hard time coming ashore to the station due to ice and strong katabatic winds that flow down the slopes and can reach 100 km/h, so the real-time data they get should prove useful even before researchers set foot on land there. Thereafter, they will have valuable weather data to use in research, and to share with us, whether we are sitting in the summer sunshine of the Northern Hemisphere or bundling up against the fall in the Southern Hemisphere.

We love that this data, from so very far away, is available to us 24/7. While the Asso Infoclimat installers used a custom satellite solution with our USB data logger to get data to their website, many of our customers use our powerful API or WeatherLink.com's feature that allows you to create a shareable link to a your data summary (without the user needing to log in to WeatherLink.com). Is your data out there for all to see and use?