HMT Publication Notice
October 18, 2013
A journal article entitled: A Twenty-First-Century California Observing Network for Monitoring Extreme Weather Events, by A. B. White, et al., was recently published in the August 2013 issue of the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology.
This article describes a collaborative project between NOAA/ESRL, California Department of Water Resources, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography to install a 21st-century observing network, provide an ensemble numerical weather prediction system, and develop decision support tools to help California deal with water resource and flood protection issues. This one-of-its kind project is a legacy for HMT in California, taking and applying lessons learned from more than a decade of winter storm research conducted by HMT along the U.S. West Coast.
This HMT-Legacy project is intended to help address some of the most extreme challenges that California faces regarding water and flood management in the face of climate change. California's population and economies (including agriculture), and thus its demands for water, are expected to grow rapidly in coming decades, in a time when floods and extreme storms are being projected to increase in magnitude and frequency, when the state's snowpacks are expected to retreat and decline, and when the state may face increasingly intense droughts.
The additional information about storms and floods and improvements in short-term (0-3 days) and perhaps even longer lead time forecasts that the new observations and numerical model ensemble may provide are of the utmost importance to the state's water and flood managers. Long-term operation of the observing network also will allow the state to track intraseasonal-to-decadal climate changes and better manage their consequences. Installation of the observing system network will be completed by May 2014.
Contact: Allen White
White, A.B., M.L. Anderson, M.D. Dettinger, F.M. Ralph, A. Hinojosa, D.R. Cayan, R.K. Hartman, D.W. Reynolds, L.E. Johnson, T.L. Schneider, R. Cifelli, Z. Toth, S.I. Gutman, C.W. King, F. Gehrke, P.E. Johnston, C. Walls, D. Mann, D.J. Gottas, and T. Coleman, 2013: A Twenty-First-Century California Observing Network for Monitoring Extreme Weather Events. J. Atmos. Oceanic Technol., 30, 1585–1603, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-12-00217.1
