Initial observations with high/low monitors

[MILW]

Well, the people at work were curious today about the Thermocrons out in the butterfly garden, so in between watching caterpillars molt to chrysalises, I went out and fetched the monitors in for reading (and found a nice fat 5th instar in the garden!).

It appears that the low monitor is seeing a wider swing of temperatures, by about 2 degrees, than the high monitor (eg cooler at night and hotter by day). But running the data in the Degree Day worksheet, they both come out very similar- for the past 7 days, I have accumulated 142.95 mDD on the high thermocron and 141.79 mDD for the low.

I'll download from my home monitors tonight and see how they have fared. I hope someone else can share their results too!

cheers- Scott

[wbl56]

With about 10 days of data recorded from the hi/low arrangement, and can say with confidence that I need more data before I can make any conclusions! If there is any trend at all, it would appear that the 1.5 meter thermochron tends to run about a degree warmer than the 0.5 meter thermochron, even taking into consideration the difference in sensitivity of the two thermochrons (i.e., under controlled identical temperature conditions, the 1.5 meter thermochron reads approximately 0.9 degrees warmer than the 0.5 meter thermochron). I am not noticing a distinct diurnal variation.

What I have observed, though, is I need to pay closer attention to when I water the garden, so I can tell if some of the significant temperature differences (up to 10 degrees in some cases) are related to the sprinkler hitting the upper thermochron more directly than the lower. I suspect that is what the temperature differences are due to, but I wasn't noting at what time I was watering, so I can't say for sure. I will pay closer attention in the future.