Chileans Visit High Plains Regional Climate Center

From left are Dr. Dennis Todey, acting director of the High Plains Regional Climate Center; Isaac Maldonado, an agronomic engineer with the Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias; Dr. Juan Alberto Barrera, a soil science professor who works with GIS and Remote Sensing at the Universidad de Concepción; and Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, Director of the School of Natural Resources.

The High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC) hosted visitors from Chile August 7-8 who came to learn more about serving the agricultural community with automated weather data.

“Their main hope was to gather information and agreements to help them develop their weather station network, and possibly applications from it to serve Chilean agriculture,” said Dennis Todey, acting director of the HPRCC. The visitors, working under the auspices of Chile’s Ministry of Agriculture, also visited the International Research Institute at Columbia University.

Chile already has a group of automated weather stations, but they’d like to network them, said Don Wilhite, director of the School of Natural Resources. The visitors were also interested in procedures that flag potential errors in reported data to the attention of people maintaining the system.

Having a good monitoring system in place is a key component of a drought plan, so the Chileans also met with representatives of the National Drought Mitigation Center to learn more about drought planning.

A Memorandum of Understanding is now in the works to formalize the commitment to to help bring Chile’s automated weather monitoring up to state-of-the-art capabilities. “They would like to send students and staff to train here on weather station development and maintenance,” Todey said. “They would also like to have some of our staff travel there to do education.”

Visiting a typical automated weather data network (AWDN) system near Firth, Nebraska, are, from left, Bill Sorensen, HPRCC software developer; Maldonado; Octavio Lagos, a graduate student in Biological Systems Engineering; Barrera; and Natalie Umphlett, HPRCC service climatologist. Glen Roebke (the photographer) demonstrated a typical station configuration for the Chilean visitors. For more information on the AWDN, please visit the AWDN Homepage.