On June 30, 2014, in collaboration with Meisei Electric, a surface weather station "POTEKA II" developed by Meisei Electric has been installed on the roof of the AICS building, Kobe, Japan. POTEKA II includes a barometer, thermometer, hygrometer, ultrasonic anemometer (the white thing in the middle of the picture), and rain gauge (the black thing on the right). In the picture, we can also find the Kobe Airport island (top left corner). POTEKA II measures these weather variables every 30 seconds and automatically reports to the Meisei server through a commercial mobile phone network. We have also installed the same type of weather stations at seven elementary schools in Kobe. We will investigate how these high-density, high-frequency surface weather measurements could possibly help improve the local severe weather prediction using the K computer.
