Deutsche Wetterdienst New Rheinstetten Weather Measurement Station Located

Yesterday I wrote a post about the Rheinstetten weather station here.

At first I thought it was the one located at the local gliding airfield, but found it peculiar that siting was pretty bad – as Anthony Watts commented. This is not something that’s typical of Germans, who like to be precise with everything. But it was the only one I could find in the local area.

Moreover, the coordinates provided by the DWD German Weather Service placed the station several hundred meters away from the gliding airfield location. Something wasn’t adding up.

Then reader Tim Channon, who has a lot more experience using tools like Google Maps, Bing Maps and Google Earth than I do, pointed out that you have to be really careful using these tools because many of the images are old and outdated. It turned out that the station at the gliding field wasn’t the DWD station.

Thanks to Tim, who used Google Earth, we succeeded in finding the new, correct DWD Rheinstetten station. Here it is:

Image: Google Earth

The new station location is indicated by the yellow thumb tack. The crappy glider airfield weather station, which I first thought was the DWD station, is to the right at the white building indicated by the white airplane symbol. Google Maps images are old and don’t show the new facility. But Google Earth does.

The photo below is a bird’s eye view of the new, correct station.

Image: Google Earth

I’m guessing the measurement station itself is located all the way on the bottom right corner of the photo, at the end of the footpath, which to me would make it quite well sited. Though I don’t know what kind of impact the agricultural activity could have on the readings.

In summary I learned a number of things in the search for the station. No. 1: Don’t expect Google maps to be up to date!

Now that this all straightened out, time to move on to other business. I’ll leave the weather station hunting to others.