Last Saturday’s Air Quality Bake Sale launched SPWS on its path to fund a new Air Quality Monitor for the weather station.  The sale featured Ozone Holes: Donuts of Tomorrow and Particulate Matter Marshmallows, as well as other station-related multiples and materials. We observed fall in full chilly swing, stationed on the block with Eyebeam’s Open House and various Alternative Transportation Parking Day projects such as Andrea Polli & Chuck Varga’s Cloud Car (we were downwind).

 

SPWS Collaborator Andrea Polli participated in the Bake Sale, contributing sonification CDs and a personal-weather monitoring badge which encourages users to visit her Hello Weather website to record their personal climate change stories.  She and Chuck also launched two weather balloons from the Eyebeam roof , where one of their two weather stations are installed.

 

On Sunday, Andrea visited SPWS to present the work she created as a resident at Antartica’s McMurdo Station via the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.  Sonifications and visualizations of weather from the poles led to her project “Ground Truth,”  a short documentary about the staff workers at McMurdo who not only maintain the station’s weather-recording devices, but also keep scientific logs of their own unaided weather observation, a process known as “ground truthing.”  While the need and usefulness for using technology to record the weather is well known, Polli’s video considers the practical and intangible value of seeing, feeling, experiencing, and recording the weather.

In the raw, unheated studio space, SPWS provided the audience with an opportunity to see, feel, and experience the October weather directly during Andrea’s talk.  Hot chocolate and Particulate Matter Marshmallows were shared.