North Platte - Monitoring Effects of Weather_Climate Center Evapotrnspiration in North Platte - Application.

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Water Supply Reserve Account -Grant Application Form Form Revised May 2007 7. Please provide a brief narrative of any related or relevant previous studies. The Colorado Climate Center has a long history of documenting Colorado's variable climatic conditions. For example, weather data back to the early 1900s for a few locations in the North Platte Basin has been collected and archived and is publicly available that shows long term climate characteristics ofthe region. Beginning in the early 1990s, we have been working in collaboration with several other research and extension organizations (USDA Agricultural Research Service, CSU Cooperative Extension, the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station, USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service) to make weather data available for decision makers in real time. The Colorado Agricultural Meteorological Network (CoAgMet) was initiated in the 1990s. Despite no centralized funding for this effort, a strong federation of motivated cooperators has resulted in a growing network and infrastructure of nearly 60 weather stations across agricultural areas of Colorado that measure key weather elements on an hourly basis. Unfortunately, none of these stations were in North Park or other areas of northwestern Colorado. Over the course of the past 17 years, a cell-phone based communications system has been developed to collect data from remote weather stations. A comprehensive website and data archive have been created to manage and display data collected by these remote stations at httpalwww.coa met.com. Expertise has been assembled and computer programs written to take weather data and compute daily grass or alfalfa reference evapotranspiration throughout the growing season. Recently, we have been working with the Division of Water Resources to refine and improve the computation and display of evapotranspiration data. The result is that we have the infrastructure in place to easily extend our monitoring capabilities into the North Platte Basin and promptly begin to collect, display and share weather conditions and reference evapotranspiration rates in comparison to other areas of the state. The proposed "atmometers" for direct measure of ET were developed here in Colorado for irrigation scheduling and are manufactured and sold by a small company in Loveland, Colorado. This low cost approach to ET monitoring is ideally suited to local collaborative efforts. Using the existing infrastructure of the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow network (CoCoRaHS) to collect and display data from volunteers, we are prepared to almost immediately be able to provide summarized maps and reports of evapotranspiration data in the North Platte basin as well as any other part of the state interested in joining this effort. Resources and publications associated with CoAgMet and other climate analysis and research projects conducted at the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University are available from the Climate Center website at httpa/ccc.atmos.colostate.edu. 12