Harnessing Online Climate Data for Agricultural Resilience and Disaster Mitigation Efforts

Abstract

Americans rely on climate data for decision making on their personal projects as well as on their country’s agricultural development. Information on climate is collected by private citizens and various government agencies at local, state, and federal levels. The state climatologist oversees the coordination of this data at the state level. In New Mexico, the state climatologist runds a website to facilitate the distribution of climate information. This evolved from a Wildcat bulletin board that was originally used for sharing climate data. It includes data gathered through the National Weather Service’s cooperative observer program and an online weather information system managed by the state. Users can access climate data for specific regions and time periods in both text and graphic formats. The website offers a search engine and provides information on climate, crop water usage, and insect development based on growing degree-days. The study opines that online climate data harnessed and analysed for for agricultural resilience can also be used for disaster mitigation efforts. Wide-reaching capabilities of tools provided by Informatics enable the sharing of valuable climate data for effective use in different spheres