Newsroom

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A climate analysis model developed at Oregon State University has become the national standard for climate mapping, and its products are used by numerous agencies, including the National Climate Data Center, the National Weather Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Applications for the PRISM technology have drawn so much interest that a private company to license and market products was developed with the help of OSU's Technology Transfer Program. That company - Climate Source, Inc. - just signed a licensing agreement allowing The Weather Channel to use the PRISM data nationwide to provide greater depth in its local coverage.

"The Weather Channel wants to use the data to improve their local forecasts and the accuracy of its weather maps," said George Taylor, an OSU atmospheric scientist who serves as the state climatologist for Oregon. "There has been a great deal of demand for the data, not only from federal agencies, but from the business community, private researchers and the general public," Taylor said. "We're not geared up to license and sell things. That's where the company comes in. They can handle the business details while we concentrate on our research."

So what is PRISM and why is everyone so interested in the model? PRISM was developed in the 1990s by Christopher Daly, an OSU geosciences professor and director of the Spatial Climate Analysis Service. The technology uses climate data from established stations and supplements it with additional data including topography, elevation, coastal influences, rain shadows and temperature inversions.

The result: more detailed, accurate maps on a much more local scale. In fact, the OSU researchers have broken the entire United States into more than 3 million grid cells, each about 2-kilometers square, and made climate estimates for each one that take into account local influences on the climate.

"Climate stations sample only a small fraction of the area of the United States," Daly said. "If you gathered all the rain gauges scattered across the country into one place, they would not even cover an area the size of a tennis court. The strength of PRISM is that it can take climate information where stations do exist, combine it with rules about how climate should vary in-between those stations, and fill in the blank spots with a high degree of accuracy."

At last count, OSU's Spatial Climate Analysis Service has produced some 300 different digital maps for any given location in the United States. These include temperature, precipitation, snowfall, rainy days, humidity, growing seasons, and many more.

The impacts, obviously, are enormous.

Farmers are using the data to determine whether new crops may succeed in a location based on daily, monthly and yearly temperature and rainfall patterns. Or they may look for the most opportune window for planting grass seed or other crops. Natural resource managers can use the data to study the influence of temperature and water levels on migrating salmon. Entomologists tie climate statistics to pesticide use for maximizing Integrated Pest Management techniques. The implications for water usage are profound.

"When you talk about water supply, agriculture and natural resources," Daly said, "most of the action takes place far from the nearest climate stations. That's where the PRISM maps come in. They will give you solid estimates just about anywhere."

After the OSU researchers first put PRISM data on their website, "we had more than a million hits in our first year," Taylor said.

The ability to get a handle on places away from climate stations is one reason why The Weather Channel has become the first commercial weather information service to sign an agreement with the new Corvallis company, according to Ian Miller, vice president of weather systems for The Weather Channel.

"The strength of (Climate Source, Inc.'s) product lies in the great detail of their data sets - even in locations with few weather-reporting stations," Miller said in a news release. "The local forecasts for these areas, as well as the graphics used to portray them, will be increasingly effective through use of CSI's data."

In addition to their extensive U.S. mapping projects, Daly and Taylor have 2-kilometer grid data for western Canada, China, Mongolia, Puerto Rico, American territories, and parts of Europe.

David Hannaway, an OSU professor of crop and soil science, has collaborated with Daly and Taylor to use PRISM mapping to better assess the climatic suitability for growing various types of grasses and crops in China.

"Using PRISM, our crop suitability mapping is portable to any place in the world," Hannaway said. "We are currently working to expand the project into Southeast Asia and beyond."

The PRISM model and resulting data sets continue to evolve. Taylor and Daly are in constant contact with state, national and international climatologists who help them tweak their model to account for local variations.

"In the old days, a climate map would last for 20 years," Taylor said with a laugh. "In the digital age, we have the ability to change constantly. We're trying to get smaller and smaller grid cells, down to one kilometer or less, and use shorter time periods.

"We're getting close to being able to create daily maps - in near real time - of climate parameters," he added. "When we do, we'll REALLY be popular."