Weather and Climate Tools

AMoN (Ammonia Monitoring Network) -  is a network that provides a consistent, long-term record of ammonia gas concentrations across the United States.

Cattle Heat Stress Forecast is a collaborative effort among the USDA ARS, the Nataional Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, (NOAA) and the National Wather Service. The day-by-day, 7-day forecast is for the entire US, and uses a scale from normal to emergency to indicate heat stress of cattle.

Central U.S. Climate Outlook Webinars provides participants information to make decisions that impact their agency, group, or business throughout the Rocky Mountains to the Great Lakes, and across America's Breadbasket. The monthly webinars are the third Thursday of the month at 12 pm MST (Register here). They are recorded and stored along with the PDFs of the presentations.

Climate Wizard enables technical and non-technical audiences to access climate change information and visualize climate impacts worldwide. It provides world maps for historic temperature and rainfall, in addition to future projections of temperature and rainfall. Maps are available for download.

CMIP5  Climate and Hydrology Projections The archive is meant to provide access to climate and hydrologic projections at spatial and temporal scales relevant to some of the watershed and basin-scale decisions facing water and natural resource managers and planners dealing with climate change. 

CONUS (Soil Database for the Conterminous U.S.)  is a multi-layer soil characteristics data set for the conterminous United States which has been specifically designed for regional and continental-scale climate, hydrology, and ecosystem modeling. CONUS-SOIL is based on the USDA State Soil Geographic Database (STATSGO) for application to a wide range of SVAT, climate, hydrology, and other environmental models.

Downscaling climate models to regional levels is available through NOAA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and US Bureau of Reclamation 

Intermountain West Climate Dashboard provides climate graphics that are automatically updated as often as the original providers post them on their respective websites (the update frequency is listed under each graphic). 

Modern-Era Retrospecitve Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA)  is a NASA reanalysis for the satellite era using a major new version of the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System Version 5 (GEOS-5). The Project focuses on historical analyses of the hydrological cycle on a broad range of weather and climate time scales and places the NASA EOS suite of observations in a climate context.

NAIP (2013) The National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) provides annual natural color aerial imagery during the agricultural growing seasons for the lower 48 states.

National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP)  is a cooperative effort between many different groups, including federal, state, tribal and local governmental agencies, educational institutions, private companies, and non-governmental agencies, to monitor precipitation chemistry.

NOAA Climate Prediction Centers  This site contains several charts and maps with information on temperatures and precipitation.

North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR)  is a regional reanalysis of North America containing temperatures, winds, moisture, soil data, and dozens of other parameters.

PRISM  Climate Group gathers climate observations from a wide range of monitoring networks, applies sophisticated quality control measures, and develops spatial climate datasets to reveal short- and long-term climate patterns. The resulting datasets incorporate a variety of modeling techniques and are available at multiple spatial/temporal resolutions, covering the period from 1895 to the present.

SCAN (Soil Climate Analysis Network) provides an interactive process to identify and retrieve data from individual SCAN sites.

SNOTEL is an automated system of snowpack and related climate sensors that conduct snow surveys for the purpose of water supply forecasting.

SSURGO (Soil Survey Geographic Database)  contains information about soil as collected by the National Cooperative Soil Survey over the course of a century. The information can be displayed in tables or as maps and is available for most areas in the United States and the Territories, Commonwealths, and Island Nations served by the USDA-NRCS. The information was gathered by walking over the land and observing the soil. Many soil samples were analyzed in laboratories. The maps outline areas called map units. The map units describe soils and other components that have unique properties, interpretations, and productivity.

US Drought Monitor  is produced in partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Vegetation Drought Response Index , or VegDRI, is a bi-weekly depiction of vegetation stress across the contiguous United States. VegDRI is a fine resolution (1-km2) index based on remote sensing data, but unlike other satellite-based measurements, VegDRI also incorporates climate and biophysical data to determine the cause of vegetation stress.

Veg DRI  The VegDRI calculations integrate satellite-based observations of vegetation conditions, climate data, and other biophysical information such as land cover/land use type, soil characteristics, and ecological setting. The VegDRI maps that are produced deliver continuous geographic coverage over large areas, and have inherently finer spatial detail (1-km2 resolution) than other commonly available drought indicators such as the U.S. Drought Monitor.