The New Mexico Climate Center
Dissemination of Climate Information
Theodore Sammis,
Donald Sitze, David Fitzpatrick and Paul Mott
Abstract
Americans use climate information to make decisions
about personal activities and activities affecting the country=s economic
development. Climate data is collected by
private citizens, local, state and federal agencies.
The state climatologist is responsible for coordinating the dissemination of this
information at the state level. The New
Mexico state climatologist developed an internet home page to help disseminate climate
information. The internet home page contains
data collected from the cooperative observer program National Weather Service=s and an automated
weather data network maintained by the state climatologist.
Internet users retrieve climate data for specific geographical areas and time
frames. The data can be presented in text and
graphical forms. Climate data, presented in text and graphical
form, can be retrieved when users submit information via the internet about the location
and time of the data they need. The New
Mexico Climate Center home page has a search engine and contains information about
climate, crop water use, and insect development using growing degree-days. The distributive aspect of the internet allows
people to share the information and tools needed to effectively use climate data.
Professor, Research associate, Research assistance,
Research associate , Dept. Of Agronomy & Horticulture, New Mexico State University,
Las Cruces, NM 88003
Key words: climate stations, weather , computers
Climate affects Americans= economic and social well being. The earliest weather diary was kept in 1644 by the Chaplain of the Swedish colonization force in Wilmington, Delaware. During the War of 1812 weather diaries were the primary source of weather information and weather diaries were kept by well known Americans including Benjamin Franklin and presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The Federal government recognized that collecting climate data would require help from citizens across the United States, since the government and educational institutions did not have the resources to collect all the data needed by private, state and federal organizations. Consequently, climate data is collected at several organizational levels. In 1883 Pennsylvania was the first of three states to appropriate funding for a climatological network which lasted only a short time. However, the federal government created the National Weather Service in 1870, and in 1955 the state Climatology program was initiated by the federal government which lasted until 1973. At that time, most states passed laws creating State Climatologist offices to assist with collecting, disseminating and interpreting climate data. State climatologists typically are employees of state agencies or are staff member of state-supported universities. State climatologists= activities vary considerably depending on the educational backgrounds of the state climatologists who may have degrees in geography, meteorology, agronomy, or agricultural engineering. In the western United states most state climatologists have backgrounds in data acquisition systems. They operate automated agricultural weather stations networked to collect and disseminate real-time weather date (Ley and Mussz, 1992, Brock etal, 1994). Currently, the climate data bases collected by state, the federal government and private organizations are primarily stored by the organizations administering each climate data collection program. Communication among different government and private organizations is necessary to avoid duplicating climate data collecting efforts and to disseminate the data to all interested parties and is one of the main jobs of state climatologist.
In 1975, New Mexico created the state climatologist
office within the New Mexico Department of Agriculture.
The office=s purpose as
defined by statue, is to assist the state to understand and respond to natural and
man-induced climate processes and their implications, to cooperate with the federal
government in activities relating to climate studies and advisory services, to promote and
disseminate general information about the state=s climatology, to
establish a state climate program in accordance with the provisions of the national
Climate Program Act and regulations. New
Mexico State University=s Board of Regents is responsible for appointing the
state climatologist (state statue 1975). The state climatologist is recognized as an academic professional, but unlike
other university academic positions, the duties of the state climatologist are determined
by state statue. These duties include: assessing the effect of climate on the natural
environment, agricultural production, land and natural resources, and human health;
initiating studies and programs to improve the understanding of the climate process and
the social and economic impact of climate changes; developing climate programs to include
state agencies and institutions of higher education; disseminating and interpreting
climate data and information; establishing a mechanism for coordinating climate
information between the federal government and other states; and administering the state
intergovernmental climate program.
Coordinating and disseminating climate information has
become an achievable goal for state and federal climatologists and private
industry and other agencies since the development of the World Wide Web, which allows each
entity involved to collect data and make it available to all other interested users.
In the past, climate data was mainly available in libraries. The federal and state government sent copies of
complied data to interested users. Data collected by private organizations was not
available. The climate data was not
available in real-time, except for information presented by newspapers and radio or
television stations. Although valuable, this
information was not stored in a manner that allowed people to retrieve the data for the
past week or month. Most state climatologists
have created home pages on the internet (AASC
1997) that present and disseminate the climate data for their state. This data may also be on home pages maintained by the National Climate Data
Center or other government agencies. This
paper will describe as a case study how New Mexico=s climate center
home page was developed and how the internet=s power helps the
state climatologist, fulfill his duties.
In New Mexico the cooperative observer program of the
National Weather Service was started in the 1890s. Temperature
and rainfall have been measured at 183 sites throughout the state. This data set represents the most diverse spatial
measurement of climate in New Mexico. However,
it is collected by hand, written on forms, and mailed to the National Climate Data center
each month. The cooperator data base is
always six months behind the current date because of the time involved in processing the
climate data. Initially, the data was
available only through printed reports in libraries.
In 1994, this data became available on CD ROMSs distributed by the federal
government and private industry. Currently, the National Weather Service is trying to set
up a system to have the data transferred daily by phone to a central computer system where
it can then be disseminated on the internet.
An automated weather data network was set up in New Mexico in 1983 to provide real-time information. The automated Campbell weather stations collect humidity, temperature, soil temperature, solar radiation, and wind speed and direction. These stations were placed at agricultural experimental stations, research centers and other state, federal and private sites in New Mexico. The data loggers are interrogated every night. A bulletin board (Wildcat), running under the DOS operating system, acted as a mini-operating system that allowed users to access all climate data collected by the automated weather data network. (Mott et al., 1992).
As part of the Wildcat bulletin board=s capabilities, information was also presented in bulletins
(table 1). The Wildcat bulletin board was replaced with a world wide web site at http://weather.nmsu.edu
and the bulletins displayed on the web site. The
bulletins cover a wide range of information from weather data to crop coefficients for
scheduling irrigations. Software was written
to automate the daily climate report for the local newspaper, which published the measured
high and low air temperature and rainfall, along with historical information about records
highs, normal highs and rain to date (table 2).
1. Las
Cruces daily weather report with history.
2. Last
seven days of Las Cruces weather.
3. Last
seven days of Las Cruces weather - metric.
4. Lawn
watering guide for Las Cruces & Albuquerque.
5. Chile
crop coefficient plot.
6. Weather
BBS's around the country.
7. Info
about IRRSCH CLM to AZMET file conversion.
8. Info
about IRRSCH CLM to SCS file conversion.
9. Annual
weather data for the Las Cruces area.
10. Cotton crop coefficient plot.
11. Spring onions crop coefficient plot
12. Fall onions crop coefficient plot.
13. Dona Ana soil survey information
14. Source of climate publications for New Mexico
15. Source of Pecan Nut Casebearer information
16. Pink Bollworm development information
Table 2. Daily
report for: Las Cruces
This report covers: 6 p.m. 01/25/1997 to 6 p.m. 01/26/1997
Measured high: 66
Record
high:
78 in 1942
Normal high:
59
Measured low:
40
Record low:
12 in 1932
Normal low:
27
Measured rain:
0.00
Total rain this
month: 0.28
Normal rain
this month: 0.39
Total rain
this year:
0.28
Normal rain
this year: 0.39
Processing and displaying data
In order to present the climate data in a format useful for users, software was written to convert the climate data files from the Campbell data logger into a readable ASCII file with descriptive headers. The same file presents calculated potential evapotraspiration (PET) and growing degree-days (table 3) and are displayed on the internet site after receiving a retrieval request for the data.
Table 3
Weather summary from NWS200: Elevation:
1176 meters
Internet links
All of the
processed weather data is retrieved using a form tool on the World Wide Web site, which
makes retrieving information extremely simple and user friendly compared to other file
transfer methods. Because of the internet=s hypertext
capabilities, a file format select button for each of the climate data formats available
is hyper-linked to a file that describes the out put file=s format and
units (
In order to
coordinate climate data dissemination between the federal government and the states, the
Soil Conservation Service developed a web site, which is available through a link from the
New Mexico Climate Center=s home page.
Other web sites
offer information that uses climate data from New Mexico. Consequently, the form users submit to retrieve climate data is set
to select climate formats required by other web sites, including temperature data used by
the University of California=s State
Integrated Pest Management project. Climate
and pest management are closely related. A
section has been installed on the web site that links to information about these inter
relationships. Climate data is used to
schedule crop irrigations, using agriculture irrigation scheduling models. Links to these models are available on the web
site. The irrigation-scheduling model that
was adapted for new Mexico was developed in Arizona (Fox et. al., 1992). Links to hydrologic information and information
about how to grow crops in New Mexico have been added to the web site. All of these sub information categories are needed
to make climate information more pertinent to the decision making process of growing
crops, managing diseases and conserving water.
Figure 1. Climate
retrieval form
Using forms to transfer information
The power of the internet allows users to submit information to servers that process the information and return results. A simple example of this application is a weather calculator that computes dew point temperature and relative humidity when a user inputs air temperature and web bulb temperature (NWS 1997). This calculator is located on a computer in El Paso, Texas and is maintained by the National Weather Service. The distributive power of the internet allows tools developed on any server in the world to be used with New Mexico climate data. A more advanced example is the development of a reference evapotranspiration calculator that uses equations requiring only temperature data and the site latitude location (Samani 1986). This calculator, located on the New Mexico Climate Center=s home page, can use data collected in New Mexico or data located from around the world at the Utah Climate Center or NCDC. This calculator also is available to all internet users. The number of calculators that can be developed is unlimited. A lawn water wizard calculator was developed using Java scrip that calculates the water use of cool and warm season grasses under different water stress levels using only temperature data ( http://weather.nmsu.edu/nmcrops/grasses/index.htm). The value of climate data is enhanced considerably, when tools are available on the internet to use climate data from any site to calculate heating or cooling degree days, potential evapotranspiration and irrigation scheduling, or to make engineering calculations.
Using graphics to display information
Climate data are normally presented in both graphical and
tabular from.Graphical form allows quick interpretation and easy detection of data that
doesn't follow the expected trend and may be an
error. The internet, through the use of Java
applications, allow data on a server computer to be plotted on a client=s computer using
Java software downloaded automatically to the client=s computer (fig.
2). Consequently, climate data can be plotted
using internet tools instead of having to download the climate data and import it into a
plotting program or spreadsheet. 
Figure 2 Graphics display of climate data
Search engine
As the state climatology program in New Mexico grew, the
number of files and material available on the home page expanded to the point that
locating material became a problem. A search
engine was installed that finds all files containing key search words. The search engine has made the site more user
friendly, decreasing the number of steps needed to acquire information. Hyper-link text has many levels and the file
structure of a computer on the internet is complex. Without
a search engine, it would be impossible to find all the material or even some material on
a given subject because that material might be five layers down in the file structure.
Feed back information
A diverse group of users need climate data. Main categories of users include agriculture and
the life science, engineering, legal, and economic development. Under each category there are 50 subcategories of
users who need climate data. Because users
are diverse, it is important for the state climatologist to receive input from them about
their needs. The New Mexico Climate Center=s home page
includes a questionnaire that is submitted electronically.
The questionnaire allows users to evaluate and give direction to information
generated and installed on the home page. In
addition to the evaluation form, users easily can e-mail the webmaster, the operator of
the home page, information about their needs or any error encountered.
User number
The average number of steps to acquire information on
the climate home page is six. The number of
users requesting information from the internet site is 500 a day. Of those
30% are commercial, 30% are educational, 15% are from other countries, 15% are not
declared, and 10% are from the local network. The
number of users is dependent on the ability to find the home page, which is easier when
the site is registered with a search engine. The
engines that searches the entire network for information have a procedure to seek new
information. But because of the internet=s size, registering a site with the search engines
guarantees that a homepage=s location and
information become part of the search engine data base.
The state climatology home page has been registered with about 30 search engines.
Conclusions
The distributive aspect of the world wide web allows
people to share the information and tools needed to effectively use climate data for
making management and engineering decisions. The
distributive aspect also allows the location and organization problems associated with
collecting and disseminating climate data to be transparent to end users. The number of steps to acquire and display the
data has been greatly reduced with the use of the internet.
The only limitation to disseminating climate information is the speed of
transferring it over telephone lines. As
technology advanced, the data transfer rate will increase even to home owners who
currently have only a low-speed data transmission line in the form of a telephone line. Both historical and current weather data can be
disseminated over the internet. In the
future the world wide web may become another way to spread disaster information caused by
changing climatic conditions.
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