Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Objective 1.  Collaborate with federal agency climate hubs and centers to highlight their unique roles and leverage limited resources for research activities related to agriculture and resource management in the western U.S.

Arizona:  (Crimmins) Working with USDA SW Climate Hub on developing rangeland precipitation monitoring best practices and decision support tools, including https://myraingelog.arizona.edu/. Several workshops have been held to deliver these tools to ranchers and land managers. Several new features based on user feedback are being developed, including a custom chart generator and notification system.

California: California: This year, the State Climatologist participated in three California Climate Hub meetings and facilitated distributing materials to partner state and local agencies as alignment warranted.  The State Climatologist also interacted with the USDA Agricultural Research Service Northwest Watershed Research Center on incorporating Lidar-based snowpack measurements into watershed-based snowmelt models.  Efforts to formalize the interaction through an agency to agency MOU have yet to be successful.

Colorado: This year, Colorado has worked with USDA climate hubs staff to gain feedback on a new Crop Specific Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (CSPEI), which takes into account the timing of planting and harvest of different crops to better analyze how drought may be affecting them. This research and tool will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in late 2020. Similarly, we have helped the USDA Northern Plains climate hub promote their GrassCast product and provided feedback to them on this tool. State climatologist Russ Schumacher gave a presentation to climate hub staff in 2020. A Colorado Climate Services Summit, organized in collaboration with numerous federal and state partners, was scheduled for September 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic.

New Mexico:  The NM Climate Center continued a collaboration with the USDA Southwest Climate Hub, Quivira Coalition, NIDIS, and the Santa Ana Natural Resources Department in holding several drought webinars focused on tribes in New Mexico and across the Four Corners. Webinars were held on June 25, July 23, August 27, and September 24, 2020. We also continued work on the air quality and agriculture synthesis project to report and synthesize the national state of knowledge on integrated air quality and production agricultural impacts across the US. We held a webinar to promote results from the synthesis on May 18, 2020. A journal manuscript on this topic is being drafted and will be ready for submission at the end of the calendar year 2020. We participated in a New Mexico meteorological monitoring gap analysis with the SW Hub, Western Regional Climate Center, and the South Central Climate Science Adaptation Center. The group searched weather station locations and is in the process of creating a data matrix to determine what data gaps exist across the region.

Objective 2.  Evaluate monitoring network capabilities to facilitate regional comparison of data to address critical issues in agriculture and natural resources management.

Arizona: (Crimmins) Working with B. McMahan (UofA CLIMAS) to develop a precipitation monitoring network intercomparison project for areas in and around Tucson. This includes using the UofA Rainlog.org network, which has recently developed an application programming interface to more readily access network data. This project will establish a high resolution combined network database to improve drought and flood risk monitoring and to help with water conservation efforts tied to water harvesting and irrigation control. The project yielded an experimental monsoon season precipitation viewer (https://monsoon.environment.arizona.edu/) and a paper in review (International Journal of Climatology) in 2019-2020.

California: This year, the State Climatologist worked with the California Department of Water Resources Programs to catalog monitoring capabilities and determine gaps within the Department.  A funding proposal to address gaps was developed and may make future budgets once the post-COVID recovery takes place.  California is exploring working with multiple agencies and partners at federal, state, and local levels on collaborative monitoring efforts for resources management in a changing climate.  Meetings have been held, but no action plans or actions have taken place yet.  Pilot project opportunities are being explored.

Colorado: This year Colorado, through funding from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, advanced the use of calibrated soil moisture measurements in drought early warning and water supply.  This was done by calibrating existing soil moisture sensors at CoAgMET stations and developing tools available on the CoAgMET website (coagmet.colostate.edu). CoAgMET also developed and built upon tools to help track evaporative demand in Colorado.

New Mexico:  Our current ZiaMet weather observational network consists of 26 stations, with 10 being configured as agricultural weather stations. These 10 stations consist of 3-meter wind and direction, 2-meter air temperature and relative humidity, solar radiation, rain gauge, and soil temperature at 10-cm depth. A key user of the data are farmers who use these agricultural stations to calculate reference evapotranspiration in crop irrigation scheduling. The remaining 16 stations are former NOAA US Regional Climate Reference Network weather stations, with triple-redundant 1.5-meter air temperature sensors and one precipitation gauge, using triple-redundant vibrating wire sensors. The data supports numerous programs, including agriculture, water management, industry, emergency management, transportation, federal and state government, education, and the media. We continue to telemeter our data to the NM Climate Center’s data center in real-time and available online http://weather.nmsu.edu. Data is also sent every 5-minutes to the nation-wide Mesowest server so that anyone can use the real-time data, https://mesowest.utah.edu/. Since 2015 we have been a part of the National Mesonet Program that provides the National Weather Service (NWS) with data from real-time weather stations. Our goal is to expand the current ZiaMet network across the state to provide New Mexicans with a high-quality source of weather information. The Climate Center has continued the operation of the NWS Cooperative station on the NMSU campus (Coop Number 290131), extending the period of record to 128 years.  This NWS Cooperative station in one of 6 Coop stations operated by NMSU across the state to collect air and soil temperatures, daily and 15-minute precipitation, and daily pan evaporation measurements.

Oregon: The PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University continues to assimilate and quality control weather and climate data on a daily basis from a large number of western monitoring networks.  These include federal networks such as COOP, RAWS, SNOTEL, and USCRN, and state and regional networks in Washington, California, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado, among others.  We are in contact with many data providers, give feedback on data quality issues as they arise, and discuss strategies to expand coverage to under-reported areas of the West. 

Objective 3.  Promote access to, use of, and further development of monitoring networks and associated value added products to meet the needs of agriculture and resource management in the West.

Arizona:  (Weiss) Arizona addressed this Objective through contributions to newsletters, which are listed in the publications section. (Crimmins) Developed an online tool that accesses and generates drought index comparisons from the NOAA NCEI nClimGrid database to support drought monitoring… https://uaclimateextension.shinyapps.io/SDIViz/.

California:  California is developing projects and programs that leverage information in monitoring networks for applications like forecast-informed reservoir operations.  The use of data for landscape management connecting fire, water, and wildlife management are being explored through multi-agency meetings.  Advancing monitoring strategies to observe, characterize, and forecast atmospheric rivers is being undertaken as part of the Atmospheric Rivers Research Program.  Efforts continue to pivot the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab research effort on an airborne snow observatory into a program-based operational environment.  Funding limitations preclude full implementation at this time, but collaborative funding ventures keep the program afloat for now.  California is working to explore the monitoring of the rain/snow transition zone of the Sierra Nevada during winter storms to better understand the impact of climate change on this key transition that pivots water supply availability with snowpack and potential flood hazard from rainfall and snowmelt.  The successful development of these concepts can be extrapolated to other western States.

Colorado: This year, Colorado attended the Annual Colorado Water Congress Meeting and the Colorado Farm Show to promote the CoAgMET network.  We also developed improved web-based mapping and data access tools for the CoAgMET website, including new interactive graphics (coagmet.colostate.edu). Colorado Climate Center staff gave multiple presentations at the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in January 2020, which highlighted how our office tracks evaporative demand and other drought indicators.

 New Mexico:  Our New Mexico Climate Center maintains a database that holds archives of daily and hourly weather data from multiple networks across New Mexico. The website http://weather.nmsu.edu is maintained at our office and serves as the portal for all web-based products. This year we are working on a pecan flood irrigation scheduling program using weather station data from the ZiaMet network and evapotranspiration forecasts from NOAA. Since this year we are in a testing phase, we will not be releasing the URL until 2021.

Oregon: Climate monitoring data serve as the driver behind the PRISM weather and climate mapping system, which produces state-of-the-art weather and climate maps for the US on a daily basis. PRISM climate maps are made available free of charge via our public website (http://prism.oregonstate.edu).  These digital grids are downloaded over 30,000 times a day and are used in a wide variety of applications in agriculture and natural resources management.  The PRISM website also provides a number of value-added products, such as data explorer that drills down into thousands of PRSM grids to provide time-series data for a specific location, and numerous graphical products. An important application of the PRISM grids is to support the USDA RMA federal crop insurance program, which has provided essential funding for this activity.  Other applications include hydrologic and ecosystem modeling, agricultural economics, biogeography, and many more.

Objective 4.  Facilitate interagency coordination for data collection and maintenance of monitoring sites in the western U.S.

California:  This year, California has worked with the Bureau of Reclamation, US Geological Survey, US Army Corps of Engineers, US Forest Service, and National Park Service to collaboratively collect weather and snowpack data for resources management.  Efforts are organized under the California Cooperative Snow Surveys, which is housed in the Department of Water Resources.  The Statewide Monitoring Network Section of the Hydrology and Flood Operations Office of the Department of Water Resources manages network maintenance and coordination with other agencies for these tasks. 

Colorado: This year, Colorado continued collaborating with the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Upper Colorado River Commission by maintaining the CoAgMET stations in western Colorado.  These stations are utilized in the Upper Colorado River Basin Consumptive Use Comparison project.  CoAgMET also receives funding from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the National Mesonet Program to further enhance the network as a Mesonet and Ag Weather Network.

New Mexico:  We continued our recruitment for the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network in New Mexico. Our recruitment efforts this year were scaled back due to COVID-19 restrictions, but we did see some continued growth through the help of our regional coordinators at the National Weather Service. In total, there are about 700 active observers in New Mexico taking on average 500 measurements on a daily basis. On September 9, 2020, we had 698 observations in the state, including 65 snow measurements. We continued work with the New Mexico Department of Transportation on dust hazards on highways focusing on Interstate 10 in Hidalgo County, New Mexico. We currently have three 10-meter tower weather stations equipped with dust sensors to monitor wind erosion.

Oregon: We continue to provide funding to the CoCoRaHS network, administered by Colorado State University. CoCoRaHS is the largest precipitation monitoring network in the country and is based solely on volunteer reports.