A Weather Station for Gualala Point Visitors

by Kenyon Rupnik

Friends of Gualala River (FoGR) and Sonoma County Regional Parks are sponsoring a weather station at the Gualala Point Visitors Center for your enjoyment of Gualala Point and Mill Bend.

In our beautiful area, Gualala Point Regional Park is a top destination for outside activities. You can spy whales at Whale Point, enjoy the Visitors Center exhibits when it reopens, walk on the beach, picnic at the park, go birding, paddling, fishing, or relaxing. The weather can be radically different in the watershed, so on-site park weather information can make for an improved visit.

FoGR and Sonoma County Regional Parks have installed a Davis weather station atop the Visitors Center. The weather station is operable, and soon residents and visitors will be able to access the data on the websites of Friends of Gualala River, the Gualala Point Regional Park, and at a display at the Visitors Center. Real time displays of temperature, wind, rain, and humidity updated every few minutes will be available for planning your visit.

This station will be the first of several stations to show some of the weather differences of the Gualala watershed. In the future, we would like to add historical weather data to the website to show how temperature and rainfall differ now from the past. Creating a weather station network, combined with other networks such as that created by PG&E, will also help raise awareness of wildfire-prone areas where windy, dry conditions predominate during summer and fall.

Weather data will also help delineate habitat information for the rich abundance of sensitive wildlife and native plant species and vegetation communities within the watershed. We are fortunate to live in one of the few areas in the world with a Mediterranean climate. Thanks to the varied topography of the Gualala River watershed, we have many different microclimates within such diverse areas as the coast, estuary, fog belt, redwood forest, riparian corridor, arid oak woodlands, uplands and more.

Each of these environments creates habitat for a wide range of species of native plants and wildlife. This tremendous biodiversity includes endangered and threatened wildlife species such as Coho salmon, coast steelhead, California red-legged frogs, Northern spotted owls and many rare native plants such as swamp harebell and coast lily. We hope our project increases your enjoyment of the Gualala River watershed and awareness of its natural richness.

Our thanks to the Regional Parks Staff for their support and cooperation, to Chris Poehlmann for his death-defying work installing the weather station, to the anonymous donors of the weather station, and to Brody Klapko who envisioned the project and has provided technical support.