Our school is a secondary school with students from 10th till 12th grade; it has about 2000 students with ages from 15 till 19 years old, 178 teachers and a staff of about 50 people. The school has several extra-curricular activities like theatre, radio, astronomy...and our weather project ì Tempo da Escolaî.
Three girls Cristina Paulino, InÍs Valente and Rita Caeiro constitute this project, with two geography teachers João Taborda and Alexandra Nunes.
What is our climate like? It is dry and hot in the summer with the temperature reaching 40 degrees. Our spring, autumn and winter are quite different year to year. About our winter... some are dry and sunny with blue sky but cold (at least for us!!); In the last year, in our weather station, the minimum temperature was minus 2 degrees Celsius in December. Other winters are damp, mild and grey (after a week, we also get grey !!). Anyway, if it rains it's not for long, but it may be a lot in a few hours. As it doesn't rain so often, in some parts of our region we have drought problems. We regret not having snow ( but on the other hand we love our blue sky.
Information about our school location, meteorological equipment and time of observations:
Latitude: 38.34`N, Longitude: 7.54`W Height above sea level: 280 m
Location: In a town surrounded by a plain, about 80 Km east of the sea coast.
Time of observation: - Local 10.30 a.m.UTC - 10.30 a.m.
Location of our meteorological sensors: 2 metres above the roof of one of the school's buildings
Meteorological instruments: Automatic School Weather Station of R& D Electronics (U.K.).
It includes: - wet and dry bulb sensors in a screen;
These sensors are connected to a front panel, which displays the meteorological information and stores it with a logging interval of 30 minutes. The connection with the computer allows us to log all data.