Cold Regions Hydrology Workshop
Breakout Session Description and Status
National Snow Maps
NOHRSC collected requirements for national maps of snow depth, SWE, and snowfall and set out a plan for implementation.
NOHRSC has already completed the tasks to routinely plot snow depth and snow water equivalent
observations for the lower-48 states and plans to include Alaska soon.
The new snow depth and snow water equivalent observation maps were a
result of discussions at the CRHW. NOHRSC was doing something similar internally prior to the CRHW
but didn't realize the demand for the product. They tweaked a few
programs and in less than 2 weeks had a new product on the web. The new snow depth and SWE observation products are located in the dropdown menu on the interactive snow information web page.
The project to map snowfall information is not as simple to accomplish due the logistics that
need to be addressed. These include getting snowfall observations into
shef since most offices use PNS or LSR reports for snowfall events which
are not encoded into shef, need to aquire the lat/lon locations for the
observers in a database, and how to deal with variable durations to derive storm totals. This will
take a coordinated effort with the WFO's to get the needed information
into a format we can use to generate the product. We hope to have these
issues addressed and a generating a "experimental product" by the March
time frame.
The following recommendations and action items were agreed to during the breakout session:
- 1. National snowfall maps will be created by NOHRSC for display on the www. The principal audience will be the general public, emergency managers, the media and NWS.
- 2. Ken King and CR HSD will work with the other regions to obtain map requirements. The initial expectation is for three maps to be created each day showing total snowfall for the past 24 hours, 48 hours and 72 hours but more feedback may change that. A number of offices have already received feedback including NERFC, FGF and MKX which will be used.
- 3. Prototype snowfall maps will be available for customer feedback by March, 2005. The maps will be implemented by December, 2005.
- 4. The snowfall data will be quality controlled at the WFOs and be in SHEF. Currently NOHRSC ingests data for an average of 2000 locations per day. These are in SHEF but the QC is not always good. The display of these data on national maps will provide incentive for better WFO QC.
- 5. The maps will have cross cutting benefits to other NWS programs such as winter weather.
- 6. The maps are expected to initially be hosted on NOHRSC servers and linked with the WFO AHPS web pages. The maps may later be hosted on the regional web farms.
- 7. Several participants in the breakout session at the workshop volunteered to work with Carrie Olheiser at NOHRSC and CR HSD to arrive at the prototype and final versions of the maps. They include Peter Gabrielsen, Bob Cox, Brian Connelly, Larry Rundquist, Mike Lukes, Becky Perry, Ray Gomez, Sherry Hebert.