I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. In association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute has embarked on a collaborative fiber arts project supported by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond.

This piece is meant to provide an example of a day-to-day engagement with data that could be added to for as long as its creator was interested. The crochet squares represent weather information obtained from our Upper Saranac Lake Monitoring Platform. Launched in May of 2017, the platform is an autonomous in-lake station that collects key physical, chemical, and biological data to enhance our understanding of lake ecosystems in support of lake and watershed science and management. Weather and limnological data collected by the platform are transmitted in near real-time to Paul Smith’s College where data is displayed on a website.

Beginning on 5 August, I visited the profiler page and made note of air temperature, wind speed, and wind direction; each instance of recorded data is represented in a crochet square in which the central circle (blues) represents a range of air temperatures, the second circle (greens) represents a range of wind speeds, and a bead is placed to represent the wind direction at the time of the reading. I make one up whenever I get a chance and the dates/times for which I’ve recorded data are random, but this method could easily be used to track a number of weather parameters over the course of any time period to create anything from a scarf to a blanket.

Data: https://adkwatershed.shinyapps.io/UpperSaranacLake/

Pattern: improvised but any crochet or knit circle within a square pattern could work. Examples: https://marlybird.com/circle-in-square-crochet-and-knit-f...