US Climate Reference Network

Changes in the climate can influence economic prosperity, national security, and human and environmental health. Businesses, citizens, communities, governments, and international organizations need accurate and high quality meteorological observations and forecasts to assess and adapt to current and potential threats associated with climate variability.

ARL has a long-term partnership with the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) to operate and maintain the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). This network provides long-term robust observations necessary to document climate trends for the United States. The USCRN provides high quality, reference-grade measurements of critical climate measures such as air temperature, precipitation, winds, land surface temperature and solar radiation. ARL’s activities focus on:

• advancing the quality and quantity of reference observations;
• evaluating select observing systems for their ability to satisfy ongoing and evolving climate requirements;
• improving the understanding of air-surface interactions; and
• analyzing long-term observational datasets and models to understand climate variability and change.

ARL manages, operates and maintains USCRN’s 143 stations, which includes 143 stations in the lower 48 (114); Alaska (25); Hawaii (2), and (2) in Canada. These stations provide long-term robust climate observations necessary to document climate trends in the U.S. The network is now entering its third decade of service, having begun initial operations in 2002.

Researchers at ARL’s Atmospheric Transport and Diffusion Division install and provide extensive evaluations and maintenance of the instruments and infrastructure for the USCRN. Additionally, ARL conducts energy, water and greenhouse gas flux measurements and analyzes their relationships. A predictive understanding of the surface energy budget and related feedbacks is critical to the understanding of climate forcing factors at the land surface and the ability to credibly predict future conditions, especially those related to water resources.

Soil Moisture

Soil moisture is a critical land surface variable impacting a range of climatological, agricultural and hydrological processes. Soil moisture observations can forewarn of impending drought or flood conditions before other more standard indicators are triggered. These measurements are useful for applications ranging from agricultural monitoring to weather prediction, and from drought to flood forecasting.

ARL soil moisture data  is available on the USCRN website as well as through the US Drought Portal. The portal is hosted by NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) under the National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network. The network was designed to integrate soil moisture data from sources across federal and state in-situ networks, such as USCRN, remote sensing data and other modeling capabilities.

Since 2008, NIDIS, ARL and the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) have collaborated to install and manage the soil moisture sensors and data acquisition integration, data ingest and quality control for soil observations at 11 out of the 114 sites in the continental U.S.

Soil moisture information is critical for weather and climate, runoff potential, flood control, soil erosion, prediction of crop yields, and reservoir management. Soil moisture plays an important role in the development of weather patterns and the production of precipitation. While there are other soil moisture networks, the USCRN is the only ground-based soil moisture network that spans the contiguous U.S. with a distribution of stations in nearly all the topographical, vegetative and climatic environments of the country.