Giving Compass' Take:

•Researchers are coming up with new algorithms to accurately calculate rainfall and evaporation in order to benefit our worlds agricultural and water systems. 

• How can we get weather stations to adopt this new research so that farmers can utilize the information? Can this research help in regards to climate change?

• Here's another example on the importance of monitoring our water supply.

Accurately capturing a raindrop’s journey to the ground is tricky business. Evaporation can cause a raindrop to shrink between the time it is captured by radar in a cloud and when it hits a farmer’s field, and this can make it hard to rely on radar-based rainfall estimations in some areas. Researchers from the University of Missouri in Columbia are taking a closer look at evaporation. With the use of specialized weather algorithms, they find they can improve rainfall estimates, and they hope their new methods will be adopted by weather stations as they evolve.

“As rainfall amounts can vary greatly over small distances and radar covers wide areas, if we can improve the accuracy of the radar data and make rainfall observations more reliable, then farmers can trust the information when making decisions regarding possible irrigation and application of fertilizer or pesticide”

Pam Knox, an agricultural climatologist for the University of Georgia in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, who was not involved in the research, thinks the “addition of evaporation into the calculation — rather than just the raw estimation of rain from the rainfall intensity — provides an improvement in measuring the total volume of water that falls on the farmers’ fields.”

Read the full article on measuring evaporation by Julia Travers at Food Tank.