Roland Larsen, seen here with his weather monitoring equipment, recently turned over coverage of precipitation data to the City and Borough of Wrangell. Although the city will be taking over rainfall levels, Larsen will still continue to provide other weather and temperature data to the National Weather Service and the Wrangell Sentinel.
For more than 20 years, Roland Larsen has been collecting weather data for Wrangell at the Wrangell Weather Office, both at its former U.S. Post Office building location, and its current residency at the airport.
In the two decades Larsen has been at the helm of the office, he has reported temperature and precipitation for the Wrangell Sentinel, but recently, collecting the data related to precipitation in the borough has fallen to the city Public Works Department.
The National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration took possession of the rain gauge from Larsen last week – and provided a new gauge to Carl Johnson of the borough’s Public Works Department, who will now be responsible for reporting the rainfall levels in Wrangell.
“I will more than likely end up being the full-time reporter of precipitation and have to report it online daily,” Johnson said.
NOAA representatives did not return phone calls requesting a statement for this story.
Larsen will continue however to collect visual and telemetric data for the city – and described how he came to be the “weather guy” in town.
“I worked for Taquan Air at the time and I was doing the precipitation and some of the general weather for them,” he said. “I then started doing it for the Wrangell Sentinel and got involved with providing them with the precipitation data in 1991.”
Although Larsen will no longer report the precipitation to the newspaper, he will continue to provide temperature data to the Sentinel on a weekly basis.
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