Agricultural Applications with Data from the North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network

State mesonets provide a valuable service to many industries. These mesonets help fill in areas where federal weather observing networks are absent and increase density of weather observations that are beneficial for weather forecasting. Furthermore, these mesonets often measure parameters that synoptic scale networks do not, leading to an avenue of application specific products on a finer time scale.

The State Climate Office of North Carolina (SCONC) maintains a statewide mesonet, The North Carolina Environment and Climate Observing Network (NC ECONet). The NC ECONet consists of 43 research-grade weather and climate stations primarily located throughout North Carolina. Each station is a ten-meter tall tower equipped with numerous sensors that record data on 1-minute intervals. Along with basic weather parameters, such as air temperature, wind speed, and precipitation, the NC ECONet has sensors that are used for a multitude of agricultural applications. These sensors include soil moisture sensors, soil temperature sensors, total solar and photosynthetically active radiation sensors, leaf wetness sensors, and black globe thermometers.

Utilizing standard weather parameters as well as the agricultural specific sensors on the ECONet towers, SCONC is able to produce a number of products to benefit not only the agricultural community, but to the general population as a whole. These products, which include total number of hours for potential diseases of crops, wet bulb globe temperatures, and low-level temperature inversions, provide users with historical and near real-time data that assists in making decisions with regards to human, crop, and livestock health. Decisions from these tools provide numerous economic and societal benefits and provide added value to the data collected by the NC ECONet.