Montana climate office adds 37 new monitoring stations

The Montana Climate Office at the University of Montana has officially completed the 2024 Montana Mesonet build season, adding 37 new stations to its expansive and growing network of weather, snowpack and soil moisture monitoring instrumentation across Montana.

The Montana Mesonet is a cooperative statewide soil moisture and meteorological information network that supports agriculture, rangeland and forest decision-makers. The Mesonet operates two subnetworks: HydroMet, research-grade weather stations, and AgriMet, focused on precision agriculture applications.

There are now 177 active Montana Mesonet stations: 88 HydroMet stations (primarily east of the Rocky Mountains) and 89 AgriMet stations. The HydroMet stations report data every five minutes and are used to enhance weather forecasts, improve drought and flood prediction, inform water supply management and assist wildland firefighting. They also provide data to policymakers, ranchers, farmers and other Montanans. 

With Montana experiencing record-breaking droughts and longer, more intense fire seasons, the Montana Mesonet is an essential public tool that provides accurate data in the present so that better resource use and policy can be implemented in the future.

“Drought has been persistent and extreme across western Montana throughout the spring, summer and fall, significantly impacting surface water supplies in major river basins, including the Clark Fork, Blackfoot and Bitterroot drainages,” said Zachary Hoylman, the assistant state climatologist. “More recently, drought has intensified in eastern Montana to severe levels, affecting agriculture and livestock production. Here, soil moisture storage is exceptionally low, stock ponds are dry and major river basins such as the Powder and Yellowstone are lacking surface water.”

The new Mesonet stations will assist the state’s drought monitoring committee in insuring drought assessment matches conditions on the ground.

Fourteen of the new Mesonet stations were constructed on reservations in collaboration with the Fort Peck, Fort Belknap and Blackfeet tribal governments. The Montana Mesonet now covers all seven reservations in Montana, with more stations planned for the Rocky Boy’s and Crow Reservations.

All data collected by the Montana Mesonet are freely available to the public and are accessible through a public web dashboard and application programming interface. The Mesonet dashboard includes a new set of agricultural tools that convert raw station data into useful metrics for agricultural land management, including crop growing degree days, the Livestock Risk Index and plant-available water.