New Weather Tech Helping Ag

New Weather Tech Helping Ag

New Weather Tech Helping Ag. I'm Greg Martin with Colorado Ag Today.

At this year's Ag Summit you'll want to catch up with Dr. Andy Jones as he bring everyone up to speed on some exciting new technology.

JONES: There's brand new technologies coming out for soil moisture remote sensing. NASA has considerable new equipment they've just launched. It's deploying a very large radar dish unit that's looking soil moisture on the ground and then we work on a variety of techniques with the weather data and inserting it into weather models.

Jones says that will give much better soil moisture information on the ground.

JONES: That impacts precipitation, also other evaporation fluxes off the ground - that would be for crop stress, yield, those type of issues. Also, we're working with people who work with pest management issues related to all the water stress issues and there's also water resource people that are very interested in that relationship as it goes between agricultural users and urban corridor water users here in the front range in particular.

He says his talk will just be skimming the surface of what is happening out there.

JONES: My main emphasis is in the assimilation of that data into the numerical prediction model at the national level. So there's a lot of products there for realtime rainfall forecasting for heavy precipitation events especially in mountainous areas in the west. So I'm going to kind of give more of an overview of the new technologies, what to expect as an industry partner to these types of technologies.

And that's Colorado Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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