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ESRL/GSD Mesonet Data |
Background
In the last several years, there has been a tremendous expansion in the number of non-NWS automated weather stations, and groups of weather stations (commonly referred to as "mesonets"), operating across the United States. The expansion reflects the need by many organizations for densely-spaced, real-time surface observations to aid in, for example, agricultural monitoring, energy and transportation planning, emergency management, fire management, and meteorological research. To fill these needs, many state and local government agencies, public utility companies, research organizations and private industries have installed mesoscale meteorological observing systems. Acquisition of data from these systems dramatically increases the number of observations available to NOAA's numerical weather prediction models, and has the potential to enable the models to better capture local and mesoscale weather phenomena.
As an outgrowth of its work on the Local Data and Acquisition (LDAD) component of the NWS Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) has developed the capability to acquire, integrate, and quality control (QC) a diverse set of these mesonet data. ESRL/GSD shares these observations with other organizations through its Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) project. Organizations already receiving MADIS datafeeds include NWS forecast offices, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the NWS National Centers for Environmental Prediction, and several private meteorological firms and major universities.
Data Acquisition
Mesonet data decoded and stored in ESRL/GSD's Central Facility includes over 10,000 stations from local, state, and federal agencies and private firms. Major contributors to the mesonet data stream are state Departments of Transportation (DOT), which provide both meteorological and road observations, the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Regional Prediction at the University of Utah, which provides "MesoWest" data from the Cooperative Mesonets in the Western United States, and the Boulder NWS Forecast Office, which provides mesonet data from the local Denver/Boulder area, and also data from the Remote Automated Weather System (RAWS) network run by the National Interagency Fire Center. New mesonet data is added weekly to the ESRL/GSD database.
Geographic Coverage
The geographic coverage is primarily over North and Central America, plus Hawaii. The APRSWXNET mesonet also has some international stations.Data Schedule
Data arrive on a continuous, asynchronous schedule, and the current and previous hour's data are processed every 5 minutes. The data are segmented into hourly files, with the mesonet file for hour HH containing data for HH00 through HH59. The lag time of these reports (lag = time available from ESRL/GSD - observation time) ranges from about 8 to 45 minutes.Observation Quality Control
Observations in the ESRL/GSD mesonet dataset are stored with a series of flags indicating the quality of the observation from a variety of perspectives, or more precisely, a series of flags indicating the results of various, automated QC checks. Meteorological applications ingesting the data can then inspect the flags and decide whether or not to use the observation. The automated checks are applied by the next-generation Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) Surface Assimilation System (RSAS) running in ESRL/GSD's Central Facility, and include validity, internal consistency, temporal consistency, and spatial consistency checks.
The operational version of RSAS has been running at NCEP since 1993, where it was implemented to produce very rapid and detailed surface analyses, and quality control information for the NWS Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS). QC results from the RSAS system have also been used for years by the Profiler Control Center (PCC) in Boulder, CO to monitor the quality of the stations in the Profiler Surface Observing (PSOS) and GPS Surface Observing (GSOS) Systems.
In addition to the individual QC checks, RSAS also produces hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly QC statistics for NWS and mesonet surface networks. The statistics are based on the results of the RSAS quality control checks, and include the frequency of failure for each station, as well as the RMS and mean errors of those failures. Statistical stratifications exist for ASOS observations, non-ASOS automated METARs, maritime observations (buoys and ships), profiler surface observations, and each mesonet data provider.
Related Links
ESRL/GSD Mesonet Network Information Links to mesonet and NWS data providers.
Real-time Observation Display Display of real-time mesonet and NWS surface observations.
Last updated 17 Sep 03.