Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

This project addressed both the monitoring of daily reference evapotranspiration (ETo) at agro-meteorological stations and the forecasting of ETo, based on downscaled meteorological variables from 1) the NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) model producing 16-day, daily ETo forecasts; and 2) the NOAA Climate Forecast System (CFS) model resulting in seasonal ETo forecast outlooks out 60-days (daily ETo) and 6 months (monthly ETo). From the research perspective, the combination of ETo monitoring at the large network of agricultural meteorological stations throughout the western United States with forecasted ETo provides the data necessary to evaluate the reliability, skill, and uncertainty of the ETo products, and serve as guidance in their improvement. This project addressed Open Water Data Initiative (OWDI) goals by leveraging a previously developed ETo agro-meteorology station network and added value to that network with forecasted ETo at various forecast lengths. The results of the project include the development of the West-wide Evapotranspiration Forecast (WwET4Cast) Network, which is a web-based service for generating and disseminating the forecasts. . In addition to the distribution of the forecasts directly from this web-based platform, the website includes an Application Programming Interface (API), which allows for data scraping of the forecasts by users and application providers. In this way, it is not necessary to access the data via the web-browser, rather data interrogation and the forecasting data can be scripted and synthesized into other tools.