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NOAA Strategic Goal: Climate Variability and Change

NOAA has several observational sites that support the World Climate Research Programme’s Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX). One of NOAA’s GEWEX sites is located near Davis, West Virginia. GEWEX sites were established to provide detailed measurements and information about the physical and biological processes that occur at the land/surface interface. Observations from these sites are being used to test and improve the current generation of land surface models that are used for both regional and global climate prediction. Key observations from these sites include the turbulent fluxes of heat, water vapor, momentum, carbon dioxide, air temperature, and relative humidity. Support for this Air Resources Laboratory effort comes from the GEWEX Americas Prediction Project, which is jointly administered by the NOAA Climate Program Office and NASA. See www.ceop.net for details.

One of NOAA’s Atmospheric Integrated Research Monitoring Network (AIRMoN) sites is located in Tucker County, WV. AIRMoN provides a research-based foundation for the routine operations of the nation’s deposition monitoring networks. Major ion data (sulfate, nitrate, pH, ammonium, sodium, chloride, and soil cations) are routinely in demand by scientists addressing process oriented studies concerned with the study of atmospheric fate and transport of various chemicals as well as numerous ecosystem issues. Other process studies of more limited duration address issues related to the maintenance of air quality, and the interaction of air pollution with the terrestrial, aquatic, and biospheric environments. Both monitoring and shorter term projects are relevant to climate, which is one driver of long-term variability and change in environmental quality. For more information and data access, please see http://nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/AIRMoN.

NOAA is installing the U.S. Climate Reference Network across the country, to measure weather and climate. About 110 stations are envisioned for the network and more than 80 stations are presently operating in 40 states, including West Virginia. The network is intended to operate for many decades, providing highly accurate and well-documented measurements of key variables such as air temperature and precipitation. Data is used operationally to put climate anomalies into historical perspective and to detect climate change. The effort is supported by the NOAA Research Climate Observation and Services Program and the Air Resources Laboratory, which designed the stations and has been assembling, calibrating, deploying, and maintaining the network sites in collaboration with NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite and Data Information Service. A list of the operational sites and links to their data are available at this URL: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/hourly.

NOAA Strategic Goal: Weather and Air Quality

Computer systems developed by the NOAA Research Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) are in operation at all NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) field offices, one of which is located in Charleston, West Virginia. ESRL has been the prime developer of the data ingest and display components of the NWS weather display and text generation system known as AWIPS (Advanced Weather Information Processing System). This system integrates meteorological, hydrological, satellite, and radar data. ESRL also developed the Interactive Forecast Preparation System Graphical Forecast Editor, a system that allows forecasters to display and manipulate forecast depictions of sensible weather (temperature, wind, precipitation, etc.), and use these to generate text and graphical forecasts for the public and other customers. NWS field offices are using this system to produce gridded forecast products, which allows forecasters to convey more information to the customers than they did in the past.

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Updated June 8, 2006