Weather Warnings
Snowpack and Soil-Monitoring Project Provides New Data to Predict Floods and Drought
By Cameron Evans
Record snowfall in the Rocky Mountains in the winter of 2011, followed by near-record spring rainfall in central and eastern Montana, resulted in catastrophic floods that caused billions of dollars of damage along the Upper Missouri River Basin.
The flooding led to federal studies and initiatives to understand how to better predict floods. Eventually a $21 million contract was awarded to UM’s Montana Climate Office to install a network of over 200 weather stations to monitor snowpack and soil moisture in the basin.
The Army Corps of Engineers awarded the multiyear contract to the climate office in September 2020 to install weather monitoring stations throughout eastern and central Montana to better predict flooding in the future. The contract is part of a larger collaboration with climate offices in Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska to install a total of 540 weather monitoring stations across five states.
“What happened in 2011 was that we had an under-measurement of winter snowpack and soil moisture in our plains,” says Kelsey Jencso, the Montana state climatologist and W.A. Franke Chair of Hydrology in UM’s forestry college. “There’s a lot of snowpack and stored soil moisture in our plains, and that’s critical to understand when we think about snowmelt runoff in the spring and summer because that water flows through the Missouri River system and to our neighboring states.”
Jencso leads a climate office team installing weather stations in the Upper Missouri River Basin.
The Army Corps contract to install 205 stations expands on the Montana Mesonet Project, a grassroots project that started with a road trip Jencso took with his family in 2016 to install six weather stations at Montana State University Agriculture Research Centers. Kevin Hyde, the Mesonet monitoring-station developer at the climate office, quickly helped grow the network to 110 stations through federal, tribal, state and private partnerships. This effort served as a foundation for the larger project.
The climate office installed the first station under an Army Corps contract in Bozeman in 2020, followed by 10 more stations in 2021 and eight in 2022. The MCO will add another 32 stations in 2023, half of which will be in the Musselshell watershed and the rest on private and tribal lands. The office is seeking new sites and partners to house stations in 2024 and beyond.
When the project is complete, there will be one station for every 500 square miles in central and eastern Montana. The stations will provide data for areas that have been notoriously underrepresented and undermeasured with climate data, including tribal lands in the region.
“Historically, Montana hasn’t had a lot of information about our plains,” Jencso says. “Our goal is to expand our ability to monitor conditions so that we can make timely actions in response to drought, fire and floods and agricultural losses.”
The stations monitor soil moisture and snowpack, as well as air temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, lightning strikes, solar intensity and precipitation.
Through better monitoring, the state will have a better picture of conditions going into the winter and be able to better predict flooding based on spring temperatures and snow melt.
“I think we’re going to see a huge increase in our capacity to get early warnings about flood-prone conditions going into the spring every year because of the development of this network,” says Kyle Bocinsky, the climate office director of climate extension and a research faculty member in UM’s Department of Society and Conservation.
State mesonets have installed a total of 81 of the 540 stations funded by the Army Corps contract thus far after just finishing the second of seven installation seasons, says Catherine Wiechmann, Mesonet Project coordinator for the UM-based Center for Integrated Research on the Environment.
The data from each station are publicly available and are transmitted every five minutes to the five different climate offices and then entities such as the Army Corps website, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s flood forecast centers, river forecast centers and the Bureau of Reclamation. The goal is to use these data in operational models and to improve daily weather, flood forecasts and drought assessment.
“The implementation model is working really well,” Wiechmann says.
Understanding Drought
Montana is always in varying degrees of drought, and data shows the state experiences extreme drought conditions more often because of climate change. The Montana Climate Assessment in 2017 found that the state will see, on average, an increase in temperature of upwards of 5 F by mid-century, and a slight increase in precipitation.
“One of the key outcomes of climate change is that it is going to get drier,” Jencso says. “But some years are going to be wetter than others, and we have to take advantage of those opportunities and be able to adjust.”
The stations will help Montanans understand local conditions in real time and aid resource management, as well as seasonal decision-making with farming, tourism and recreation.
Jencso says the Governor’s Drought and Water Supply Advisory Committee monitoring sub-committee that he sits on already uses data from the existing stations on a weekly basis.
“A great example is this year,” Jencso says. “We had an OK snowpack, we had decent spring precipitation, but because we were still in a drought from the previous year, we lacked soil moisture at depth.”
The data from stations across the state showed the deeper soil reservoir was depleted, meaning there was a strong likelihood that Montana would progress into bad drought conditions by mid and late summer, which Jencso says “is exactly what happened.”
“It was a good early warning of drought conditions,” he says. “This is critical because the weekly drought maps released by the National Drought Monitor, in coordination with state drought task forces, trigger billions of dollars in federal programs that support producers during times of drought.”
Community and Tribal Partnerships
The Montana Climate Office partners with farmers, ranchers, tribes and local watershed groups to place the stations and fill information gaps for conditions in rural areas.
“We’re looking for stakeholders who see the value in the data for use in their local community,” Jencso says.
For farmers, the data will improve precision agriculture by helping predict the best times to plant and harvest by showing water availability for plants. Measurements of wind speed and direction can help determine how much pesticide and fertilizer to apply.
Jencso says a next step will be building simple, easy-to-use tools and applications to help people get key takeaways from the data and make decisions quickly. The climate office will use those tools in partnership with tribes to ensure that tribes can use the data gathered on tribal lands.
“Historically, we’ve had incredibly sparse monitoring on tribal land,” Bocinsky says. “We’re committed to making sure these data get back to land managers, emergency coordinators and extension agents in Native nations so that they can make use of it.”
Bocinsky currently works with the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes to include climate projection information in their new hazard mitigation plan, and the climate office will install eight new stations on the Fort Peck reservation.
The office also will work with Blackfeet Community College to integrate data into student training. Although not directly tied to the Army Corps project, the climate office also is partnering with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Reservation to establish a station and co-develop a drought dashboard tool.
“It’s a pilot for how we could establish this network west of the divide,” Bocinsky says.
The Army Corps contract is funding the construction of the stations, but it doesn’t include the modeling and forecasting efforts for stakeholders to use the data. Jencso says improving modeling around the data is a major goal of his office.
“It’s a construction project, and it’s going to be a monstrous undertaking to build these stations,” Jencso says. “We don’t want to build all of these and then have them go dark in five years when this project ends. We’ll need state interest and support to bolster this network and its value.” •
