Deborah H. Lee, the chief of water management for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Great Lakes and Ohio River Division, has been named the new director of NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL). Lee is slated to begin on December 1, 2014.
Scientists aboard the NOAA Gulfstream IV aircraft are flying over the Pacific Ocean off the U.S. West Coast this week to measure air pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction to help better understand atmospheric rivers - narrow conveyor belts of water vapor that can bring beneficial water supply and snowpack as well as create dangerous floods.
Knowing when, where and what to grow or graze animals can be the difference between a bumper harvest and facing starvation. Rainwatch provides monsoon rainfall data in real time from monitoring stations and tracks the key seasonal attributes important for food production.
Independence Day is right around the corner, and Michigan's Lake St. Clair residents and tourists are gearing up for a holiday weekend filled with fishing, swimming and boating activities. Beach managers can now view NOAA water quality predictions in real-time, instead of waiting 24 hours as before, to make timely decisions to safeguard public health and avoid unnecessary beach closures.
The Colorado River provides water for more than 30 million people. Increasing demand for that water combined with reduced flow and the looming threat of climate change have prompted concern about how to manage the basin’s water in coming decades. NOAA-funded researchers at the University of Washington and co-authors at eight institutions across the West aim to explain this wide range, and provide policymakers and the public with a framework for comparison.
Rain Garden, a new free iPhone app, guides users on how to create and install rain gardens that curtail runoff of pollutants, prevent erosion, and provide wildlife habitat.
NOAA, NASA and the University of Connecticut are representing the United States in the Hydrological Cycle in the Mediterranean Experiment (HyMeX), the largest weather field research project in European history.