The Science
Featuring a selection of my instrument station photos from around the world (10 countries, 3 continents), the piece is a tribute to the old-fashioned Stevenson screen that encloses meteorological instruments. The Stevenson screen protects the instruments against precipitation and direct heat radiation, while still allowing air to circulate, thereby providing a standardised environment for measurements. Some stations are small, some pretty, some worn-down, some in the snow, in the sun, in the city, at the sea-side or in the mountains. As diverse and distant as these stations may be, they all hold together to collect data for improving global weather forecasts and for keeping a record of Earth's climate. This is represented through the register card in the background used by thermo-hygrographs to record temperature and humidity. Recently, modern automatic stations started to replace the Stevenson screen, and this could lead to its extinction.
The Artist
Roland Eichinger is an atmospheric physicist currently working as a climate modeller at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and at Charles University Prague. His connection to the Arts is rather erratic: sometimes ideas pop up and some of these ideas can even be realised. For this artist, there exists a Flickr site: find more pics and stories about the stations at https://www.flickr.com/photos/baserauskas/
Copyright statement. This work is published under the CC BY-NC-SA license