Drought Monitoring: USU's Utah Climate Center Continues to Support State With Data During Drought

As Utah’s third driest year in the past 128 years of records persists, Utah State University’s Utah Climate Center continues to provide climate services and drought data to state professionals.

The center monitors conditions for an ongoing committee called the Utah Water Assessment & Conditions Monitoring Task Force — for which Jon Meyer, the Assistant State Climatologist with the Utah Climate Center, says his group is a lead player.

Hosted through webinars held about every two weeks, the Utah Climate Center partners with the Utah Division of Water Resources, Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, as well as federal agencies to provide assessments on water conditions across the state — from soil moisture changes to one-month outlooks on temperature and precipitation. Attendees of the meetings are then given the chance to talk about the conditions they experience day-to-day, according to a description of the webinars on the Utah Division of Water Resources website.

"The beautiful thing about this is it gives us really a finger on the pulse of the needs of the state," Meyer said. "Not from a top-down perspective, it’s certainly a part of it, but really bottom-up."

The Utah Climate Center was founded in the 1890s, according to their website, and "has been devoted to accurately documenting and sharing climate information for businesses and the public alike."