Cooperative Project Gives
Oklahoma Good Weather Data

By David Bowser

ARDMORE, Okla. — Everybody talks about the weather. Nobody does anything about it — except in Oklahoma.

There the National Severe Storm Laboratory and the University of Oklahoma got together with a group of agricultural scientists, primarily from Oklahoma State University, to find a way to better monitor the weather in the Sooner state.

"It's pretty variable," says Howard Johnson with the Oklahoma Climatological Service. "There's a wide variety of weather any given day."

The 10 airport observation systems across the state at the time weren't giving a complete picture of the state's weather patterns, Johnson explains. The idea of the Oklahoma project, which dates back eight years, was to create a network of automated weather stations across the state.

They were fortunate that at that time they went to the state seeking money, the governor was Henry Bellmon.

"Gov. Bellmon was a farmer himself," Johnson says. "He was very interested in the technology. He was very enthusiastic about the project."

He also had a fund available for such projects to the tune of about a million dollars.

OU and OSU each put up another $300,000 to establish the network to provide weather data throughout the state on a real-time basis.

While the two universities put up the initial funding with the money from the governor's office, the state agreed on a funding mechanism through the board of regents for the schools.

"It funds about half the network's operation," Johnson says. "The other half has to be obtained from research grants and user fees."

The Noble Foundation helped keep them going in the early days.

"We would probably not be here today if it were not for them," Johnson says.

Called the Oklahoma Mesonetwork, today the project is a joint project of the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. They started with 110 stations.

"At the present time, we run 115 stations around the state," Johnson says.

There is at least one in each county. The average spacing between stations is about 20 miles.

"We've done a reasonably good job of covering the state," Johnson notes.

The project is governed within the two universities by a six-person steering committee, three from each school.

"We found out in dealing with it, our interests tend to be the same," Johnson says. "It doesn't matter which university you come from. It's been an amazing relationship. In fact, we were the first really successful cooperative effort between those universities."

Since World War II, various partnerships between the rival schools have been formed and failed.

"In this particular instance, because everybody was on the same page, it's worked out very, very well," Johnson says.

They've joined with the Agriculture Research Service grazing lands station at El Reno, which has for years operated a fine scale hydrological network between Chickasha and Lawton in the Little Washita River Basin. The ARS operation brings another 42 stations into the network which monitor primary rainfall.

Johnson says the ARS stations aren't as complete as the others, but they help fill in geographic voids.

"We also operate that network for them," he says.

The basic information collected by the Mesonetwork includes air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, rainfall, air pressure, solar radiation, soil temperatures and soil moisture.

The soil moisture component uses a new set of instruments, Johnson says, that aren't fully operational yet.

"We're still trying to figure out what they say," he concedes.

Johnson thinks that will be sorted out by this fall.

He says it ought to give them warnings in the early stages of drouths.

"Maybe we can get a handle on them before they start," Johnson opines.

The towers at each site stand 33 feet tall. At the top is a wind vane with a propeller on it, an anemometer to measure the wind speed and direction. The temperature and relative humidity are standard heights for meteorological measurements, about five feet above the ground. The rain gauge is off to the side.

Each site also has probes in the ground to measure the soil temperature.

Only about 80 of the sites so far have the soil moisture sensors, which are simply thermometers. The theory behind the moisture sensors is that moist soils leach heat away from a sensor more rapidly than dry soils. Moist soil, therefore, will be cooler than dry soil.

They have also conducted experiments in reporting the formation of dew or moisture on plants.

"Data are gathered from these things about every 15 minutes," Johnson says. "The observations are going on continually, and what we get every 15 minutes is three averages of the previous five minute periods."

Every 15 minutes it broadcasts its reports to a nearby receiving station. In most instances, the receiving station is at a local law enforcement agency.

"Through an agreement with the Department of Public Safety, another group of people who made the network possible, that is relayed through their system and brings it into Norman where we can process the data," Johnson says.

The data from the sites is available to climatologists in Norman about five minutes after the site broadcasts it.

"It takes about five or ten minutes to get the data and check it for basic validity to make sure there are no minus 50 degree temperatures or 800 mph winds out there," Johnson says. "Then we put the information up for use."

The meteorological community and National Weather Service use it. The airports and most of the television stations in the state subscribe to it.

The data, usually on a delayed basis, is also available on the Internet.

"We've developed a fairly aggressive Web presence in the past year," Johnson says.

The real-time data is available through subscriptions to individuals for $10 a month. Local county Extension agents also have the data or have access to it

"I really expect that in the next generation of Web products that will be available shortly, there will be some real-time data for public access," Johnson says. "Right now, it's delayed data. Yesterday's highs and lows. Actually, we do better than that. We have a map now that shows our high and low so far today."

With increased data, he says, forecasting is becoming more accurate, but, he warns, they shouldn't be expected to be perfect.

"Meteorology is a very good science," Johnson says. "The forecasts are very reliable out to about three days. They're pretty reliable out to five days. Anything past that, we don't call them forecasts. We call them outlooks because the mathematical models don't work that well."

There are too many variables.

"There are too many things that can go two ways or three ways or five ways," Johnson says. "When you get the long range — the 30, 60, 90-day outlooks — take those things with a grain of salt."

The probability of a long range outlook is about 38 percent, Johnson says.

The long range outlook for Oklahoma calls for near normal precipitation through September and October, he says, but the best way to get it to rain is still to put the combine on the edge of a field during wheat harvest.

The website is www.ocs.ou.edu.

"In the little over five years that this network has been collecting data, we have collected 99.87 percent of the available observations," Johnson says. "It is a very reliable network."

But there have been mishaps. They've had several towers hit by lightning.

Most of the sites are away from highways for security purposes, but there has been some vandalism.

"Occasionally, the local tree climbers like to test their ability to climb these towers and maybe run off with an anemometer," Johnson says. "I don't know why anybody would want one, but we've had several of them stolen. I guess it's like leaving your name on the water tower. It proves you got there."

Texas A&M University and Texas Tech are trying to establish such a system in Texas. Tech expects to have a pilot system in operation around Lubbock next year.

Missouri is establishing a system along their highways. North Carolina is also establishing one that will be smaller in scope than Oklahoma's.

Illinois and Nebraska have similar systems and there's a small one in southeastern Washington.