Mesonet Siting Tool

Find the best places for new monitoring stations.

1Region

You can also draw the region on the map. If your file has several areas, pick one from the list above.

No region yet.

2Existing stations

No stations yet. You can also start from scratch.

CSV files need "lat" and "lon" columns. Drag a station to move it, or click it to remove it.

3New stations

4Overlaysoptional

Display

Off

For display only. It does not change the results.

Existing station New station (siting order) Empty area filled by the last new station Boundary

About the method

Patrignani, A., Mohankumar, N., Redmond, C., Santos, E. A., & Knapp, M. (2020). Optimizing the spatial configuration of mesoscale environmental monitoring networks using a geometric approach. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 37(5), 943–956. doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-19-0167.1

How it works

  1. A Voronoi diagram splits the region among the existing stations. Its vertices, and the points where its edges cross the boundary, are the candidate centers of unmonitored areas.
  2. Around each candidate, the largest circle with no station inside is drawn. Its radius is the distance to the nearest station.
  3. Each circle is clipped to the boundary. The one with the most area inside the region is the largest empty area, and the new station goes at its centroid.
  4. The new station is added to the network and the process repeats, giving a siting order for as many stations as needed.

Because circles are clipped, sites on the border count only the area inside the region. With no stations, the first site is the point farthest from the boundary. Distances and areas are computed on an equal-area projection centered on the region, so results are valid anywhere on Earth.

Why not simple buffers?

A common alternative is to buffer every station by a fixed radius and place the next station at the centroid of the largest area left uncovered. This approach can work well when the buffer radius matches the spacing of the network, but it has two limitations. First, the result depends on the chosen radius: if the radius is changed later, the entire analysis has to be redone and the suggested sites move. Second, the uncovered area left between the buffers is often irregular in shape, and its centroid can land close to an existing station or even outside the region.

The largest-empty-area method has no tunable parameter. The candidate centers come from the Voronoi diagram of the existing stations, which by construction identifies the points farthest from their nearest station. Every candidate is evaluated, and each circle is clipped to the boundary so that sites near the border are credited only for the area inside the region. In this tool, buffers are used only to display the footprint of each station.

Created by Andres Patrignani, Soil Water Processes Lab, Department of Agronomy, Kansas State University