Climate Change Monitoring and Detection
NOAA/OCO – Program Support for the Assimilation, Analysis and Dissemination of Pacific Rain Gauge Data: PACRAIN
Funding Type: CIMMS Task III (Program Manager – Mike Johnson and Joel Levy)
Objectives
Support NOAA’s Office of Climate Observation (OCO) effort to “build
and sustain the global climate observing system that is needed to satisfy
the long-term observational requirements of the operational forecast
centers, international research programs, and major scientific assessments”;
continue in our role as the Surface Reference Data Center (SRDC), a core
program which supports the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP)
and the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX), by expanding
our mission to collect, analyze, verify and disseminate global rainfall
data sets and products deemed useful for Operational Forecast Centers,
International Research Programs and individual researchers in their scientific
endeavors. Housed in the Environmental Verification and Analysis Center
(EVAC) at the University of Oklahoma, the EVAC/SRDC has built upon work
from past NOAA-supported projects to become a unique location for scientists
to obtain scarce rain gauge data and to conduct research into verification
activities. These data are continually analyzed to produce error-assessed
rainfall products.
Accomplishments
Rainfall data is particularly important in the tropics. Not only
is it a tracer of latent heat, it is vitally important to the understanding
of ocean properties as well, such as latent and sensible heat flux, salinity
changes and attendant local ocean circulation changes. In addition, raingauge
observations from lowlying atolls are required to conduct verification
exercises of nearby buoy-mounted rain gauges, many of which are funded
by the OCO Program.
Scientists need only to access the EVAC/SRDC web site, http://www.evac.ou.edu/pacrain, to obtain the most comprehensive Pacific rainfall data set anywhere, and http://www.evac.ou.edu/srdc to obtain critical regional raingauge data sets. Many of these regional data sets are impossible to obtain elsewhere. The EVAC/SRDC serves the research community by actively working with individual countries in environmentally important locations to help provide them with infrastructure, education and other short and long-term support. The return on this investment by NOAA has been significant in terms of enabling EVAC/SRDC to provide the scientific community with critical, one-of-a-kind raingauge data sets and to have established ongoing mutually beneficial relationships which should lead to future collaborations. Past successes with this strategy have proven very worthwhile on a cost-benefit basis.
Due to the importance of tropical Pacific rainfall data to climate research and operational and climate forecasting we are intensifying our efforts by working collaboratively with the Pacific Island Global Climate Observing System (PI-GCOS) program to effectively and efficiently match the areas of commonality among both OCO’s and PI-GCOS’s objectives. One of these common areas is the strengthening of the existing Pacific observation climate networks for both atmosphere and ocean.
Of particular importance is rain rate of which few data records exist in the tropics. This year our project implemented an automate instrumentation program to distribute high quality MetONE tipping bucket rain gauges to various Pacific meteorological services. These gauges each contain a data logger which is read once every three months and contains tip data which is translated into rain rate. The use of data loggers is necessarily useful for the understaffed Pacific meteorological services which do not have the capability of implementing a climate network in their countries which require frequent maintenance and data recording. The data loggers allow a single meteorological staff member to maintain the network and record the data. To date we have sent 50 gauges to 7 Pacific countries and are now receiving tip data from several of these countries. Our goal this year is to have all 50 gauges installed and maintained on an operational basis with regular receipt of data for the PACRAIN data base.
We are using the above strategy to expand our efforts to increase the raingauge climate observing data base representing specific, environmentally critical locations. It is not our intention to collect all raingauge data world-wide, but to assimilate raingauge data 1) in environmentally critical locations (e.g. tropical Pacific), 2) where dense raingauge networks exist and 3) where agreements can be made to help construct raingauge networks in these critical locations. We organized a workshop on automated weather systems for tropics which was held in Noumea, New Caledonia, during June 2006. The members of the workshop recommended that this project go forward with our automated rain gauge instrumentation program and try to expand the automated instrumentation beyond the tipping bucket project.
It is our belief that by working directly with local Pacific Island meteorological services, we bring tangible benefits to the global climate research community through data base enhancement. In turn, the local meteorological services benefit directly through enhanced forecast products developed by the scientific community using these critical data sets.
This project is ongoing.
Installing a MetONE rain gauge at the Niue Meteorological Office