Development and modernization of NOAA's U.S. Climate Observing Network

A critical need for monitoring the climate in the U.S. is the development of a National to Regional Scale in-situ climate observing system. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) is designed to provide national scale trends for temperature and precipitation and is comprised of 114 stations across the contiguous U.S. This network will be completed in 2008. Parallel to this effort is a partnership with NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS), National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), and Office of Atmospheric Research (OAR) to develop a regional scale climate observing network called the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN-M). This program will install 1,000 modernized stations across the U.S. that will enhance the capability of the USCRN by providing additional observations of temperature and precipitation of the same quality but with more dense spatial coverage, thus enabling detection of regional climate trends with greater confidence.

The USCRN network will also expand the sensors on each station to include soil moisture, soil temperature and relative humidity beginning in 2008. These sensors will be used to enhance the understanding of climate change with respect to the long term water budget and support the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). In addition, the USCRN program plans to deploy and operate 29 CRN stations across Alaska, leveraging the lessons learned and proven processes from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) project in the lower 48 states and the four operational prototype CRN stations in Alaska since 2001 (Point Barrow, St. Paul, Sitka, and Fairbanks). The pilot for this will begin in 2008.

The USHCN-M prototype network began in Alabama in 2005 and now has 14 stations installed. The USHCN-M leverages the USCRN infrastructure to minimize biases in the historical data record by using a common site selection process using regional teams that include NWS, NCDC, and Regional Climate Centers, common sensors and requirements for precision and calibration, ingest, QC, archive, and access systems, and metadata management systems (station history). A pilot project is planned for the southwest to include Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico to install 141 USHCN-M stations over the next two years.