Weather and climate monitoring: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:30, 14 January 2022

Overview

Monitoring the weather and climate of the Colorado River Basin is made possible by an extensive network of regular observations of weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, and winds. This "meta-network" actually comprises many individual weather station networks that have been separately developed and expanded over time, usually to serve particular monitoring purposes (e.g., agriculture, water supply).

Currently, there are roughly 1,000 active weather stations within or adjacent to the boundaries of the basin that are part of formal monitoring networks. Site-specific data from the vast majority of these weather stations can be accessed in near-real-time (with lags from 5 minutes to one day) from online portals (see Data and tools below); archived data from previous months and years are also typically available.

The data from these weather stations are also gathered and processed into widely used gridded climate products. These gridded climate products are designed to reduce the inadequacies of the station data in two important ways

Spatial distribution: Stations are not evenly distributed across the landscape; gridded products interpolate between station observations to provide continuous spatial coverage
Temporal consistency: Individual stations may only be active for a few decades or less, and over time may experience changes in location, instrumentation or observation time; gridded products adjust for these "inhomogeneities" to provide comparable data over time

Relevance

Observations from weather station networks are consulted and used throughout the basin for many weather and climate monitoring applications, such as agriculture, water supply, wildfire management, aviation, road safety, and drought monitoring. One key water-supply application is NOAA CBRFC's use of real-time precipitation and temperature observations from SNOTEL and COOP stations to initialize their streamflow forecasting system with the current moisture conditions for each catchment. After weather station observations are processed into gridded climate products, they can be used for additional near-real-time monitoring applications, and also for historical analyses.

Data and tools

MesoWest

This site created by the University of Utah provides map-based access to 1000s of real-time observations from the NWS and FAA (ASOS/AWOS) automated networks, RAWS, SNOTEL, APRSWXNET/CWOP (citizen weather stations), and many other networks. Very useful for monitoring of temperature, winds, humidity, and recent precipitation; users can also access historical observations.

NOAA NCEI Climate at a Glance

The “CAG” tool is a versatile tool that can be used to generate many types of charts, maps, and analyses from NOAA’s official nClimGrid monthly gridded climate dataset. Selecting "Regional" and "Time series" at top brings up several dozen region options, including the Upper Basin and Lower Basin. Selecting "Regional" and "Mapping" allows data to be mapped with river basin boundaries.

Climate Toolbox - Historical Climograph

This tool, developed by researchers at the U. of California-Merced and partners, generates climographs of average (1981-2010) monthly temperature and precipitation for any point, county, HUC8 watershed, or user-selected area, from the gridMET gridded (4 km) climate dataset.

Additional resources

State of the Science Report

Chapter 2 of the State of the Science report describes these patterns, mechanisms, and trends in much greater detail, in sections 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.7, 2.8, and 2.10.

Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States

Chapters 4 (Present Weather and Climate: Average Conditions) and 5 (Present Weather and Climate: Evolving Conditions) of the 2013 Southwest Climate Change Assessment cover the climate processes and patterns and climate variability and trends, respectively, of the six states of the Southwest region (CA, NV, UT, CO, NM, AZ).

Research directions

New and Notable Research (2020-present)

[<URL FOR PAPER>]

Summary

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 ==Overview==
-Monitoring the climate of the Colorado River Basin and describing its patterns and changes over space and time is made possible by an extensive ground-based system of observations of weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, and winds. This ad-hoc system is comprised of a number of different weather station networks that have been developed and expanded over time, usually to serve particular monitoring purposes (e.g., agriculture, water supply).
+Monitoring the weather and climate of the Colorado River Basin is made possible by an extensive network of regular observations of weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, and winds. This "meta-network" actually comprises many individual weather station networks that have been separately developed and expanded over time, usually to serve particular monitoring purposes (e.g., agriculture, water supply).
-Currently, there are roughly 1,000 active weather stations within or adjacent to the boundaries of the basin that are part of formal monitoring networks. Very few of these networks were established specifically for detecting long-term climate trends, but with careful adjustments for changes in station location and instrumentation, their data have been used for that purpose as well.
+Currently, there are roughly 1,000 active weather stations within or adjacent to the boundaries of the basin that are part of formal monitoring networks.
+Site-specific data from the vast majority of these weather stations can be accessed in near-real-time (with lags from 5 minutes to one day) from online portals (see Data and tools below); archived data from previous months and years are also typically available.
-Site-specific data from the vast majority of these weather stations can be accessed in near-real-time (with lags from 5 minutes to one day) from online portals (see Data and tools below); archived data from previous months and years are also typically available. The data from these weather stations is also gathered and processed into widely used [[Gridded climate products]].
+The data from these weather stations are also gathered and processed into widely used gridded climate products. These gridded climate products are designed to reduce the inadequacies of the station data in two important ways
+* Spatial distribution: Stations are not evenly distributed across the landscape; gridded products interpolate between station observations to provide continuous spatial coverage
+* Temporal consistency: Individual stations may only be active for a few decades or less, and over time may experience changes in location, instrumentation or observation time; gridded products adjust for these "inhomogeneities" to provide comparable data over time
 ==Relevance==