College Station, Texas
March 9, 2004
Is it snowing in Amarillo? Blowing
dust in Lubbock? Parched in Fort Stockton? Raining on South
Padre?
On any given day, the answer is
probably -- maybe. That's why we double-check The Weather
Channel before we travel in Texas . . . . We have to
second-guess the meteorologists to really be prepared.
But where do Texans turn for a
longer-term perspective on the state's ever-changing climate?
The Texas Weather Connection, a
Web site of the Spatial Sciences Laboratory in College Station,
provides real-time climatological data on drought, rainfall,
soil moisture and vegetative greenery statewide.
"We have been online for a year,"
said Dr. Raghavan Srinivasan, associate professor of forest
science and director of the lab. "The Texas Water Resources
Institute provided the seed money necessary to initially make
our climatological tools available online. It took us about two
years to develop a means to make these tools available to the
public through an automated website."
The site is a collection of
weather-reporting tools derived from data gathered through
satellite remote sensing, geographic information system, global
positioning system and Internet mapping technologies. Web
surfers who visit
http://twc.tamu.edu can find:
-
Daily and cumulative rainfall
totals from the National Weather Servicefs Next Generation
Weather Radar (NEXRAD);
-
The latest temperature, relative
humidity, solar radiation, dew point, wind and precipitation
information from 77 weather stations across the state, as well
as the North Plains Weather Network, a cooperative effort of
The Texas A&M University System Agricultural Research and
Extension Centers in Lubbock and Amarillo;
-
Interactive maps of the
Real-Time Vegetation Monitoring System developed at the
Blackland Research and Extension Center in Temple, the latest
NEXRAD radar data, the Keetch-Byram Drought Index; and
-
The latest Texas Fire Danger Map
based on fuels, weather and topographical data generated from
automated weather stations that are part of the National Fire
Danger Rating System and Weather Information Management
System.
The Texas Forest Service uses the
site to monitor drought and assess fire danger in all 254
counties.
Robert Whitney, Texas Cooperative
Extension agent in Comanche County, uses the Web site to help
dairy producers in his county track rainfall events and runoff.
"For environmental purposes, large
livestock operations are required to manage all the manure they
generate, and that can be quite a chore," Whitney said.
"Properly maintaining and managing a manure treatment lagoon
system to keep runoff out of the local watersheds is very
important to our dairymen and the Environmental Protection
Agency.
"We use TWC to track and record
actual rainfall that will affect our runoff. It's also valuable
for crop producers because we can track rainfall patterns each
year, and then over time we can develop crop rotation sequences
that fit well in those patterns."
County agents and Extension
specialists elsewhere in Texas are using TWC data to generate
accurate computerized crop production models using CroPMan
software (a crop and production management model).
"CroPMan allows us to simulate a
growing year on the computer. We use TWC daily weather data to
generate accurate climatic models," said Tom Gerik, professor of
crop physiology and production with the Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station at the Blackland Research and Extension
Center. "We can monitor weather data at different weather
stations statewide, download and update our weather data
profiles, and then use CroPMan to generate real-time crop
simulations, or to make management projections.
"We are currently testing and
evaluating CroPMan's usefulness at several locations across
Texas. The ultimate goal is to evaluate current production
methods compared to the best management practices that CroPMan
may generate. This will help farmers minimize the production
risk inherent in dryland crop production."
Other interactive tools are being
developed through ongoing research, Srinivasan noted.
"In the future, users will be able
to find interactive maps for potential evapotranspiration (PET),
soil moisture and runoff," he said. "You will be able to select
a county from a Texas map and learn how much irrigation is
necessary to supplement known rainfall, how much moisture is
stored in the soil profile, or how much runoff to expect from
different rainfall events.
"These products will provide
information useful for agriculture, flood mitigation, water
allocation from reservoirs, as well as watershed and water
resource management practices." |