Oklahoma Climatological Survey: Innovations in Weather Monitoring

1. Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS) Climatologists Ken Crawford, Director and State Climatologist Mark Shafer Derek Arndt Gary McManus

2. 36 FTE plus 9 graduate, 9 undergraduate students $2.6 million total funding for OK Mesonet $450K state funding for State Climate Office and Outreach programs $365K external funding (research and technology transfer) Funding

3. 157 sites, 3000 sensors 99.7% collection efficiency 3 site visits every year Additional measurements: soil moisture, Eddy-Covariance Fluxes, CO2 Mesonet 2002 Institute A leader in quality-assurance techniques Oklahoma Mesonet

4. Oklahoma Mesonet Sites

8. Communications upgrade begun (all radios must be upgraded by 2005) New ingest, processing, and QA software Moved to Linux-based OS Cheaper, more flexible Increased network security Mesonet Infrastructure

10. Manage 1500 web accounts ftp access to real-time Mesonet data Phone / visitor requests for information (~15 per day = 3750 per year) Data holdings: OK Mesonet (beginning 1994) Cooperative observer data (beg. 1892) WSR-88D, 15 sites (beg. 1998) NWS text messages (beg. 2002) Service

11. Old-Fashioned Real-Time Data

12. Merge with Other Data Sets

13. Real-Time Alerts

14. Agricultural Models

15. Routine press releases and telephone contacts, carried in at least 80 newspaper articles OCS monthly summary revamped http://climate.ocs.ou.edu/ OCS/Mesonet Ticker – e-mail of interesting observations, sent to more than 100 subscribers (free), about 2-3 times per week Media

16. OCS/Mesonet TickerE-mail: darndt@ou.edu Newspapers and TV eat this stuff up – they get an “angle” for a story. Sometimes, it launches a story of its own. And it adds to your credibility daily.

17. 640 trained at OCS workshops in 2002 Developed materials for the Magic School Bus weather exhibit (visiting 36 cities nationally) OK-FIRST (emergency managers) Earthstorm (K-12 schools) Rural Electric Cooperatives Outreach Programs

20. WxScope plugin for browsers WeatherScope application software (new) WeatherBuddy desktop application Overhauled or developed new web sites: Ag Weather NWS products OK-FIRST Client Software

21. WxScope Plugin

23. Joint Urban 2003 dispersion experiment Defense Threat Reduction Agency Department of Energy Department of Homeland Security International H2O Project (IHOP) Soil Moisture Experiment 2003 (SMEX03) Research Collaboration

25. JOINT URBAN “PARTY BUS”