Weather and climate monitoring

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 established and maintained, 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 consistent data over time

Most of the gridded climate products are not independent of each other, since they share at least some baseline observational data from weather station networks and use similar processing.

In the Colorado River Basin, as elsewhere in the West, high-elevation weather stations were extremely sparse before the establishment of the SNOTEL network starting in the late 1970s. So the gridded climate data for mountain watersheds critical to water supply is much less reliable prior to 1980.

Relevance

Observations from weather station networks are directly 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. Once real-time weather station observations are processed into gridded climate products, those products are widely used for near-real-time to seasonal monitoring applications, and also for historical analyses.

Data and tools

Weather station data

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.

Gridded climate products

NOAA NCEI Climate at a Glance

This versatile tool can be used to generate many types of charts, maps, and analyses from NOAA’s official nClimGrid monthly gridded climate dataset.

Climate Toolbox

This toolset, developed by researchers at the U. of California-Merced and partners, generates many different types of charts and analyses from the gridMET gridded (4 km) climate dataset.

Additional resources

State of the Science Report

Chapter 4 of the State of the Science report describes weather station data and networks, and gridded climate products, in much greater detail.

New and Notable Research (2020-present)

[<URL FOR PAPER>]

Summary