This bill requires the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere to maintain a National Mesonet Program. The Program must gather and use more local and non-Federal environmental data (including commercial and academic data) to support forecasts, drought and fire monitoring, and water events. It must add more types of observations each year, encourage local and regional sensor networks (like soil moisture stations and ground-based profilers), set up agreements with outside networks, and coordinate with NOAA satellite data.
The Program must increase data density used by the National Weather Service for baseline forecasts, nowcasts, warnings, and hyper-local forecasts. It must collect more boundary-layer data for numerical weather prediction and identify gaps in terrestrial and marine observations. The bill directs support for soil moisture monitoring, the National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network, and expansion of road-weather observation networks. The Program must obtain data only when cost effective and meeting quality standards, leverage existing networks (including supplemental radar), provide technical and administrative infrastructure for new non-Federal networks, and coordinate with NOAA data systems. An active advisory committee with academic expertise must advise the Program. The Under Secretary must give annual briefings to relevant congressional committees through 2035.
The bill authorizes specific funding to carry out the section: $50 million for FY2025, $55 million for FY2026, $61 million for FY2027, $68 million for FY2028, and $70 million for FY2029. It requires that not less than 15 percent of the amount appropriated for the Program in a fiscal year be awarded for financial assistance to State, Tribal, private, and academic entities to build, expand, or upgrade mesonet equipment and capacity.
No publicly available information.
No publicly available information.