For years, if you wanted official weather data anywhere near Venice, you had to look more than 30 miles away to Myakka River State Park. That changed this month, and the fix has a name: Dorothy.
The State College of Florida has installed a new weather station, nicknamed Dorothy, at its Venice campus in North Port. The compact unit tracks wind speed, moisture, temperature, and barometric pressure in real time, feeding that data directly to the National Weather Service and NOAA to sharpen forecasts across a stretch of Sarasota County that has taken direct hits from Hurricanes Ian and Milton in recent years.
Natural science professor Jason Barr, who helped bring the station online, said closing that 30-mile gap matters most when a storm is bearing down.
“It’s good for the community because now there is always a reinforcement that real information is coming out, and if you’re reliant on other stations that are few and far between or scattered, it can be concerning because here I might have different weather conditions than just 15 miles away,” Barr said. “That makes a big difference when we are talking about storms.”
The name Dorothy is a small tribute layered three ways deep — a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” the storm-chasing classic “Twister,” and Barr’s late grandmother, who used to call him her “little professor.”
Beyond storm tracking, the station will also serve as a teaching tool. Starting in fall 2027, State College of Florida students will use Dorothy’s live data in a new introductory meteorology course covering practical forecasting and the atmospheric mechanics behind Southwest Florida’s notoriously localized weather.
Barr isn’t stopping at one station. He said he plans to expand the network within the next year by installing two more units at the college’s Bradenton and Parrish campuses, giving Sarasota and Manatee counties a denser web of ground-level storm data heading into future hurricane seasons.
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