Applied Climatology at the Kentucky Mesonet

The Kentucky Mesonet was founded in 2007 with the construction of a single station at the Western Kentucky University agricultural farm. Since that time the network has expanded to 83 sites in 74 of the Commonwealth’s 120 counties and is expanding rapidly with the goal of at least one station per county. Not only has the network expanded, but existing and new stations have advanced their monitoring capabilities with sensors to measure vertical wind, field cameras, near-surface thermal inversion monitoring, and improved soil moisture and temperature sensors. The objective of this talk is to discuss research that covers a subset of the socioeconomic sectors that utilize mesonet data such as transportation and the food-water-energy nexus.

With the network aging it is possible to develop a climatology at individual stations. Climate indices, a variation of the ETCCDI (CLIVAR) climate change indices, will be presented and include:

• Temperature, Pressure, Humidity Indices (e.g. Mean, Min., Max values)
• Cold Wave Indices (Growing Degree Days, Frost Days, etc.)
• Heat Wave Indices (15 different definitions of a heat wave)
• Precipitation Indices (e.g. Very Heavy Precipitation Days (>20 mm), Precipitation sums, etc.)
• Wind Indices (e.g. Days with a given wind direction)
• Heat/Drought Indices (Drought Measures, Reference Evapotranspiration, etc.)
• Compound Indices (e.g. Soil Moisture – Precipitation)

Indices that are percentile-based utilize the NLDAS-2 data set from 1980 through 2009.

Near-surface thermal inversions, important to diurnal meteorology and agriculture, are discussed, and a new machine learning forecasting algorithm is utilized to better predict their onset, duration, and intensity. Roughly twenty-five stations are equipped with inversion observing sensors over a data set that varies from two to five years and the results are organized between meso- and microscale geographic distributions and are quantified in terms of inversion duration, intensity, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, and soil moisture.