When it comes to managing water, there’s a “Goldilocks problem”: runoff frequently delivers far too much or far too little water to the landscape. In the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB), catastrophic floods and droughts between 2011 and 2021 highlighted the need for more and better water information to deliver earlier warnings and respond to extremes from both sides of the water supply spectrum.
To address this data need, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded three complementary projects in the UMRB focused on improved monitoring, data acquisition, and data application. This included (1) the buildout of hundreds of new mesonet stations across the basin, led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; (2) a data acquisition and use pilot led by the National Weather Service National Mesonet Program; and (3) the UMRB Data Value Study, led by NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), to evaluate how these data can support improvements to water resource models, drought monitoring capabilities, and other applications. Taken together, these projects are a multi-agency collaboration to fill regional gaps in water monitoring, with an emphasis on soil moisture and snowpack.