AUSTIN (KXAN) — Texas State celebrated the opening of its first-ever Round Rock campus weather station last week.

“So we’ve been working on this idea for about a year. I just happened to say, casually one time, I would love to build a weather station for Texas State University,” said Kenny L. Tapp, a meteorologist and lecturer with the university’s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. He teaches a popular general elective meteorology course.

“We can show them, [these are] the cool weather instruments, and then we can look at the weather data in the classroom and in their homework and actually get to, it’s just as much as we can in meteorology with hands-on with the weather data, this is a way to do it,” Tapp said. “And there’s just a lot of cool weather that happens in our part of Texas.”

When he began looking for a spot for the project, he just looked out the window of his lecture hall at the open field.

Tapp worked with the Texas Water Development Board to design the station for teaching, research, and collecting real-time data for the community.