Frost advisory · Tonight, 02:00 to 07:00 · Ashgrove Hill and the upper vale
Valley frost expected under a clear sky and light wind. Cover tender plantings and keep the dam path gritted.
Issued Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 06:00
The valley's weather,
read four times a day.
The Fairweather Bureau has kept the Kestrel Valley ledger since 1934: four stations, two balloons a day, and a pencil that has not been retired yet. Today's readings are in.
Bulletins
Current advisories
Updated every hour on the hour. The dam path note stays up all winter.
Strong wind watch · Friday afternoon · Point Brace coast
Southwest gusts to 65 km/h possible along the Brace peninsula as the low passes south of the coast.
All clear · Elsewhere · Kestrel Valley
No other advisories. The synoptic chart shows a quiet ridge parked over the valley through midweek.
Stations
Four roofs, one ledger
From the ridge pasture to the dam wall. Every station keeps an hourly log and a weather eye.
Ashgrove Hill
elev 412 m · est. 1934 · 11.4°C · W 18 km/h
The bureau's home station on the old ridge pasture above Ashgrove. Records temperature, wind and rainfall every hour by hand and by machine.
Point Brace
elev 9 m · est. 1947 · 10.8°C · SW 26 km/h
A white timber hut on the Brace peninsula, kept by three keepers who share the fog-signalling duty and the logbook.
Vale Observatory
elev 388 m · est. 1962 · 9.9°C · NW 12 km/h
The stone observatory where the valley's weather balloon leaves twice a day, at dawn and at dusk, regardless of the season.
Kestrel Dam
elev 231 m · est. 1958 · 12.2°C · S 9 km/h
A concrete gauge house on the dam's east wall, measuring river height, outflow and the reservoir's slow moods.
On the record
The wind route, plotted
A single balloon's dawn track from the ridge to the coast, drawn from today's radiosonde run.
Radiosonde FW-1141, Vale Observatory, 06:15. Track simplified for drawing; the ledger keeps the numbers.
Journal
From the notebook
Reading the Summer Heat
What forty-one summers of Kestrel Valley thermographs say about the warm weeks, and why the valley floor stays calm when the ridge does not.
6 min read · Ines Kaldo
Why the Bureau Still Measures by Hand
Our automatic rain gauges are good. They are not good enough to retire the pencil. A case for the daily observer and the six-figure ledger.
5 min read · Tomas Reyes
The Fog Diary
Every keeper at Point Brace has kept a private fog diary since 1951. We asked the current three what theirs say.
4 min read · Marta Ossler
Join in
The bureau takes observers
Sixty-one volunteer co-op observers around the valley read a gauge and a thermometer once a day. It takes four minutes and adds a line to the record that outlives all of us.