Crofton Men Operate Weather Web Site
Crofton Webcam
CROFTON, Neb. — Two area men have taken their love of weather, photography, wind surfing and computers, and rolled them all up into one. Actually, it’s more than one thing. There are two computer stations, weather tracking gizmos, four cameras, two Web sites and a server out in Salt Lake City. And that’s just for today. Next week it may be different for Dave Zavadil and Greg Dohrman of Crofton. But for now, they believe their sites are the only online digital photos of Lewis & Clark Lake to date.Four years ago, Zavadil decided he wanted to register a domain or Web site on the Internet. It wasn’t a big expense — only $10 — but the benefits now will really give the residents of Crofton tons of weather information. During the four-year time span, Zavadil thought about what he would do with his site. A strong interest in the science of weather is shared with two of his brothers. One is a pilot and the other studied meteorology in college. It seemed a good use for the zavadil Web site would be Crofton weather. Dohrman was introduced to the weather site because he works with Zavadil’s brother. He began talking to Zavadil about another way to take advantage of the local weather site.
“I get a lot of phone calls about the conditions of (Lewis & Clark) lake,” Dohrman said. “People call to ask, ‘How are the waves?’ ‘What’s the wind doing?’ ‘Is it getting down on the water?’”
Dohrman is a wind surfer aficionado and has a great vantage point from his house situated on the Nebraska bluffs. He had given a lot of thought to setting up a site for people who love to do recreational pastimes on and around the Lake.
“Wind surfers look for specific conditions,” Dohrman said. He said they look for steady winds of 20 mph that are down on the water. Wind direction would be important to determine where they may launch from, either the Yankton Marina or further upstream at Weigand.
The Zavadil domain is used quite frequently. Zavadil also works with a professional tornado spotter from southern Nebraska who will be able to use the Crofton weather site in the case of severe weather outbreaks. Zavadil has been a weather observer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the past 20 years.
“Being a weather observer is one of those jobs like being pope,” said Zavadil with a laugh. “You usually have to die in order to get rid of it.” He has kept quite busy with his volunteer position and invested a lot of time and dollars upgrading his equipment.
The original equipment in the Zavadil backyard was placed there by the U.S. government weather service out of Valley, Neb. The first post kept track of high and low temperatures, and precipitation was monitored in a cylinder that had to be manually emptied and measured for either snow or rain. This weather information was kept for every 24 hours and posted at 8 a.m. It is still considered the official weather information, which Zavadil sends to the National Weather office in North Carolina. Zavadil also has lightning detectors on top of his ham radio tower (another hobby of his) that can sense lightning strikes, count them and send the information back to one of his computers, creating a bar graph. He can monitor the intensity of a storm using these tools, which are more current than radar on The Weather Channel that may show storms that have already passed through an area.
Zavadil’s Web site displays bar graphs, lows, highs, wind speeds and precipitation. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. One can also check the past week’s highs, last month’s wind speeds, and a whole year of low temperature. Daily averages are posted, wind chills are there if one wants to know and the exact location of the weather station by longitude and latitude.
The small video at the top of the page is one of the newest additions to the Web page. It’s a current view of Crofton’s western sky and changes every 10 minutes. Zavadil’s webcam catches weather changes 24 hours a day. He hopes to add another couple of cameras so he can cover the complete a 360-degree visual of the Crofton skyline.
An authentic weather cam is a spendy item, so Zavadil’s sons have been helping him produce covers for the cameras out of plastic buckets completely sealed so the camera is protected from the elements. The first cam was set on the radio tower this fall, and so far, it’s working well. The plastic buckets are a cheaper outlay than the more complicated enclosed weather Web cams offered online for sale. Dohrman’s setup includes two high-tech Web cams that look west to the Weigand Marina and north across the lake. The two cameras take digital photos every 10 minutes during daylight hours and are downloaded to this Web site.
Along with the digital lake photos, Dohrman also has weather information that he “grabs” from several others sites. He uses local weather information from Zavadil, information from the National Weather Service and other lake condition information from the U.S. Corps of Engineers. Dohrman’s webcam digital photos are also posted on Zavadil’s Web site. So, along with Zavadil’s current weather photo of the southwest skyline of Crofton, two lake photos are also displayed: to the west and to the north of Dohrman’s lakeside home. Several digital photos of local wildlife and sunsets can also be viewed from his site.
One project the two men had discussed involved taping the melting of the ice off the river this past spring. Dohrman downloaded more than 1,000 photos that covered the two-day ice melting, and Zavadil converted them to a video that also can be seen at the Crofton weather site. Videos of some interesting winter weather days have been posted at the site and available for viewing. Zavadil explains how a program he has on his computer collects the minute-by-minute photo shots of the webcam into a file and stitches the photos together to create the windy weather movies. That adds up to 660 individual shots that are put together for a video. Zavadil’s goal for this upcoming summer is to be able to follow a thunderstorm with his webcam and create a time-lapse photo view of the storm so the average person can see how it boils up from nothing to something.
A second pole in Zavadil’s backyard hosts a new electronic weather station he purchased last summer. This unit measures precipitation continuously. A small bucket inside the unit collects moisture as it rains. When the bucket is full, it dumps and has the volume of one-hundredth of an inch and the information is sent back to a console on Zavadil’s weather desk in the house. After a night rain, he can see it rained 3 hundredths of an inch at 3 a.m. It also keeps track of temperatures.
When Zavadil thinks about the whole setup, he himself is amazed. He has four computers talking to each other, two weather stations talking to the computer setup as well as Web cams and lightening sensors talking from another set of cables. Now Dohrman’s weather information is also uploaded. Then, all the information is sent electronically to his Web host to be included on the Web site. “I just love to do it, don’t make any money but it sure keeps me busy,” Zavadil said. “Yep, it’s my hobby.”
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