Implementing Weather and Climate Data Networks for Agriculture

Daryl Herzmann1

Raymond Arritt1

Dennis Todey2

1Iowa State University

2South Dakota State

Outline

Motivations for a Mesonet

The Iowa Environmental Mesonet (IEM), a different approach

Agricultural Applications

Spatial Variability

As you know, weather and climate occurs on all spatial and temporal scales. How can we representively monitor these environments?

AND, on a budget?

Example NEXRAD plot showing

ASOS coverage.

Build a Mesonet!

Meso – Spatial Scale, Net – Network

Spatial scale from ~1 to 100s of km

Tradiationally, mesonets have been built from scratch, which is very expensive!

The Iowa Environmental Mesonet, a new approach

We realized that the state was already full of environmental observing platforms.

Why not centrally collect these networks to produce a low-cost, high-return mesonet?

Data Processed Daily

Filling Ag Data Requests

User defined query

User defined Growing Degree Day criteria

Updated daily with observed data

Climatological Differences

Interactively query the NWS COOP climate database.

Example, compare daily temperature climatology versus what actually happened that year!

Daily Temperature Spreads

Accumulate all high / low temperatures for a day and produce a histogram

Dynamically generated on the website

Historical GDD data

Dynamically generate GDD, SDD from the COOP climate archive

Customized Period

Dynamically generated output plot.

GIS Ready dataset presented immediately below

Iowa Soil Erosion Project

PI: Rick Cruse, ISU

Collaborators:

ISU Agronomy

U of Iowa Hydrology

National Soil Tilth Lab

NSERL @Purdue

ISU Statistics

South Dakota State

Erosion Project Ingredients

National Resources Inventory (NRI)

Provides detailed information used to produce soil, management, and crop data files

Rainfall data from IIHR @ U of Iowa

15 minute ~4km resolution

IEM provides climate summary data

WEPP Soil Erosion Model

Comparing Input to the Output

I'm done, questions?
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu

Daryl Herzmann

3010 Agronomy

515 294-5978

akrherz@iastate.edu

2003-10-21T21:25:52