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If professor Jan Kliessl is right his little computer will shave ten percent off U.C. San Diego's energy bill.
From athletic fields to utility poles to a rooftop robot, Kleissl's engineering students track climate conditions across campus. The cool coastal conditions on one side and hot inland conditions on the other side of campus make U.C.S.D an ideal lab for using weather to cut energy costs.
That's one student anticipating the day's weather. Imagine what a 12-hundred acre campus could do with detailed data on temperature, wind speed, solar radiation and rainfall.
The weather stations, powered by car batteries and solar panels, transmit data around the clock to a campus computer. That info will determine when to irrigate fields and open vents, where to place solar windows and how to design buildings to take advantage of weather patterns.
Kliessl hopes the merging of engineering and meteorology will provide a blueprint for energy conservation in your home and worldwide.
USING THE WEATHER TO GO GREEN,
ABOUT SOLAR CELLS: In the future, more homes will most likely incorporate solar cells, also known as photovoltaics. Solar cells are made of semiconductor materials (usually silicon), which absorb sunlight energy and store it until it is needed to power something. Unfortunately, present solar cells can only absorb between 15-25 percent of sunlight's energy. This is because they only absorb visible light; other kinds of light pass right through the cell as if it were transparent.
SENSORS MEASURE WEATHER CONDITIONS: A sensor is a type of transducer: an electronic device that converts energy from one form to another. For instance, microphones convert sound waves into electrical signals, while speakers receive the electrical signals and convert them back into sound waves. There are many different kinds of sensors, but most are electrical or electronic. A photosensor is an electronic component that detects the presence of various wavelengths of light: visible, infrared or ultraviolet for example. The electrical conductance will change in response to the intensity of the light being detected, and a computer records this change. At UCSD, they are measuring conditions at many campus locations in order to learn the best places to place solar panels and other technology that will help them save energy.
The American Geophysical
Union
and the American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
ON THE WEB: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/12-07WeatherMonitoringSystemRG-L.html
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