Vermont is upgrading its ability to forecast the weather.
At the Caledonia County Fairgrounds in Lyndonville on Tuesday, officials unveiled the first of 21 advanced weather stations they plan to erect around the state as part of a “mesonet” — a network that can observe meteorological events such as floods, drought and snowstorms in real time, according to Joshua Beneš, associate director of research facilities and networks at the University of Vermont’s Water Resources Institute. The publicly available data will help Vermonters prepare for dangerous weather and aid farmers and others in ag.
“As we’ve been seeing with this increased flooding across the state, we really need this type of infrastructure to … know what the active conditions are on the ground to respond better to extreme weather events in the state,” Beneš said.
Vermont is one of just 12 states without a mesonet. New York has one with 127 stations. It will take three years to roll out the 21 stations around Vermont at a cost of about $4 million, according to Beneš.
The 30-foot-high stations will each have a camera and will update every five minutes. They’ll be powered by solar panels and batteries, and they can measure wind speed, snow and rain amounts, soil moisture, relative humidity, temperature, and solar radiation, which can help electric utilities know how much they can depend on solar power at a given time.
The first station went up in the Northeast Kingdom in part because weather radar is blocked by Mount Mansfield, meaning it’s harder to predict conditions in that part of the state, Beneš said. He pointed to localized flooding last July that dumped several inches of rain in places such as Sutton.
UVM is running the project in partnership with Vermont State University and several state agencies, plus the National Weather Service. Beneš said he has been in touch about hosting stations on college campuses in Bennington, Middlebury and Norwich, and Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury has also expressed interest in having one on-site.
“I’m thrilled to support our state being a safer place and doing something that can potentially save lives in the future,” Beneš said.
This article appears in May 6 • 2026.
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