Live from City Park Golf Course, it’s — the weather?

For the first time since 1995, Denver has a weather station that measures temperatures and other conditions in the heart of the city.

The station, located near the 12th tee, was unveiled Wednesday morning.

“The weather around here is very localized, so we are filling in a piece of a puzzle,” said Larry Mooney, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Denver/Boulder forecast office.

Weather stations are traditionally located at airports, said Byron Louis, the Weather Service’s data acquisition program manager. So when Denver International Airport replaced Stapleton more than a decade ago, the weather-forecasting equipment moved to the new airport, 18 miles east of town.

People noticed. They regularly called TV stations to complain that the weather wasn’t monitored in Denver, said Channel 7’s chief meteorologist, Mike Nelson.

“My response has been, ‘Don’t complain to the weatherman, complain to your congressman’ ” because the Weather Service requires funding to build a station, Nelson said.

When Nelson got a different kind of call, requesting ideas for how to go about putting a facility on top of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, he was more receptive.

Working with museum operations vice president Dave Noel, Nelson brokered a public/private partnership between Denver and Vaisala, a Finnish meteorology-equipment company, as well as the Weather Service and the museum to build the station.

The golf-course station, managed by the museum, relays data by radio signal to the museum, where it is forwarded to the Weather Service.

The state-of-the-art station — a fenced-in antenna about three stories high, tethered by guy wires and festooned with sensors — cost between $25,000 and $50,000, said Vaisala president Scott Sternberg, who is based at the company’s North American headquarters in Louisville.

Elcar Fence donated the fence, and Mercury Electric wired the site.

Weather data collected by the station includes wind speed and direction, temperature, barometric pressure, visibility, relative humidity, dew point, heat index and precipitation.

Checking Denver weather

Although Denver International Airport is still where the city’s official weather statistics are collected, data from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science weather station can be found on the museum’s website, dmns.org.