National Weather Service National Mesonet Program Upper Missouri River Basin Soil Moisture and Plains Snowpack Data Acquisition

In the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB), catastrophic floods and droughts between 2011 and 2017 highlighted the need for more and better water information to deliver earlier warnings and respond to both wet and dry water supply extremes. To address this data need, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded three complementary projects in the UMRB focused on improved monitoring, data acquisition, and data application:

• Build out of 540 new mesonet stations, led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, alongside state mesonets and tribal nations
• A data acquisition and use pilot, led by the National Weather Service
• A data value study, led by NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), to evaluate how these data can support improvements to water resource models, drought monitoring capabilities, and other applications

To conduct this Data Acquisition and Use Pilot, the National Weather Service is working with Synoptic Data, a private company, for real-time collection and storage of the new UMRB data from the state mesonets as each station comes online. Synoptic Data also acts as a data sharing platform and API for federal partners with access permissions.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and NOAA’s National Weather Service will use these data to support improved river and runoff modeling, a foundational tool for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reservoir management. The data will also be available via the National Weather Service’s National Mesonet Program to support partner  agencies working on a range of research and applications, including flood and drought early warning, water supply forecasts, fire hazard assessments, agricultural management, and more.