Outdoor Display: Diurnal Pumping

The HRECOS folks installed a display on the Walkway Over the Hudson that shows current environmental conditions at the river sampling station just north of the bridge:

HRECOS Display with internal condensation
HRECOS Display with internal condensation

Those two blurry white rectangles are paper charts taped to the inside of the case below the scrolling LED display, so I think they’re discovering what happens when you trap ambient air inside a sealed enclosure without dehumidification. Even if they weren’t opening the case every now and again to change the charts, diurnal pumping would pull outside air past any affordable non-hermetic seal.

That fancy electronics won’t last long under those conditions; I foresee several pounds of silica gel in their future…

3 thoughts on “Outdoor Display: Diurnal Pumping

  1. They could just put the data on a web server and we can all use our smartphones to view it.

    1. This gives an in-your-face display of the data under your feet, which is actually a good point for a public facility. OK, that’s what would happen without a sheet of condensation on the glass…

      The link takes you to their extensive web datasets for all the monitoring points, but the plots don’t work well on teeny screens.

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