Community Engagement Activities with the New Mexico ZiaMet

The New Mexico mesonet or ZiaMet recently expanded to more than 200 stations with the help of many individuals, organizations, and communities. This talk will highlight some of the work to build this network and going forward to engage these groups in climate services. We partner with the Navajo Nation Climate Change Program and Navajo Department of Water Resources in establishing mesonet sites across the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. As part of the outreach, we visited and gave presentations to each Navajo chapter house. We met first with chapter leadership and then with community members. Some future goals are to translate the Navajo station pages to the Diné language. We are collaborating with other tribes including the Pueblos of Acoma, Santa Ana, Sandia, Ohkay Owingeh, and Nambé on outreach and weather station site hosting. Much of our outreach for ZiaMet revolves around drought. We currently partner with the USDA Southwest Climate Hub and our state drought working group in promoting ZiaMet data and products from ZiaMet. Our National Weather Service Forecast Offices in New Mexico were a major part in design, planning, and site selection process and are one of key partners in using our real-time data and for outreach. We regularly communicate with individual Soil Water Conservation District offices for promoting ZiaMet and reaching out for future expansion. Other community and media outreach include talks at agricultural science center annual field days, news releases through the university, local news articles including a visit from Senator Heinrich at one of our stations, and an article in the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau newsletter. We also provide updates and photos of during site maintenance using newsletters to site hosts, and through social media.