Farmers May Help Improve Weather Forecasts

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association is currently working to build up a forecasting modeling system that will give more reliable long range forecasts.  Dr. Neil Jacobs says a key to better forecasts is coming up with more weather observation sources beyond the usual satellites and weather stations.  He said one source might be farmers.

“There's a lot of folks in the agriculture industry that have a tremendous amount of observations. Whether they're using drones, or they have all sorts of soil moisture sensors, they've actually deployed a lot of observing systems for their own use. And I think it's not a very heavy lift to try to figure out how to install a com system to uplink a lot this data so that we can actually assimilate in to our mod. It would benefit them and it would benefit us.”

However, many farmers are concerned about ownership of their data and privacy issues.

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