New rainfall monitoring system for flood warning alerts in Doña Ana County

On Wednesday October 29th 2014, representatives from the Doña Ana County Flood Commission (DACFC), the National Weather Service (NWS), and New Mexico Climate Center (NMCC) office met to discuss the last updates of the “New Rainfall Monitoring System to Aid in Flood Warning” project. The purpose of this meeting was to go over the county and Elephant Butte Irrigation District's plans for establishing an ALERT network.  According to NWS most of the network will be made up of precipitation and stream flow gauges, but there will be some full-fledged weather stations involved.  One of the goals is that all agencies can work together to ensure that resources are spread out and used in such a way that they benefits everyone.

The DACFC office in conjunction with the NWS and other entities has installed the first series of rainfall monitoring station in Doña Ana County. Collected data from these stations is available for the public on internet.  One of the benefits of this project is that this data can be used as a research tool. During the meeting, they agreed that collaboration from the different agencies is crucial in order to gather all the data into one site and make it available for people that need it.

Data contained at the website are from automated sensors and are provisional. One of the challenges of creating this webpage is to make data uniform, since receiving data from different agencies weather stations result in units discrepancies. They recognized this and are working on it.

According to Paul Dugie, the Doña Ana County Flood Commission Director, the warning system represents an ongoing investment that augments diversion structures and dam maintenance with tool for residents to monitor rainfall in upstream areas.  Knowing what happen upstream is going to be key in understanding downstream behavior and this represents a valuable tool, not only for these agencies but also for the USGS as a key entity.   

DACFC is identifying population centers as potential monitoring sites to place the alert systems, since these zones are where more population is at risk.

The rainfall gauges all send data to a central tower on A Mountain east of Las Cruces, and a transmitter on that tower relays the information to the Doña Ana County Government Center, where it’s posted onto the Internet webpage at: https://donaana.onerain.com/home.php

This website and the network of rainfall and stream level gage sites is a collaborative project of Doña Ana County Flood Commission, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, the City of Las Cruces and the National Weather Service.

Available data:

• Current and historical rainfall and river level monitoring data
• Access to a network of weather and stream data collection equipment that are located throughout the County
• Real-time local weather data  
• Historical data for gage sites
• Ability to view data within multiple map views or view lists of gage sites
• Graphing and tabular data downloading functions for selectable time periods

Coming soon data:

• Current water levels in the Rio Grande
• Links to regional weather and river level forecast sites for up to the minute severe weather and flooding outlook

Full implementation is estimated to be completed in 2017. It includes 30 remote weather stations, stream gauges and water-level monitoring stations located throughout Doña Ana County, all of which will be linked to the National Weather Service and to other gauges in southern New Mexico and El Paso County.

 

-Cristina González

Sources:

https://donaanacounty.org/content/new-rainfall-monitoring-system-aid-flood-warnings

https://donaana.onerain.com/home.php

Monsoon season 2014 in New Mexico

The Monsoon season (June 15 to September 30) in New Mexico started with minimum or none rain during June and it was not until early July that we received the first rains but less than one inch. The active period was almost at the end of the season (early-mid September) which provided moisture during these last weeks.  We also had a big event in where received more than 3 inches of rainfall in some zones, mostly in Las Cruces and Southwest NM (figure 2).  The ideal is to receive the rainfall distributed along the entire season in multiple events and not in only one, but it was not the case. We end up with few events in September, including one big event of rain. The inconvenience with this is that we receive a large amount of rainfall in a short period of time and this causes the soil to get saturated and in consequence we have increase in runoff and floods. This was the case of the Mid-September event, in which we received input from the remnants of hurricane Odile (Last week rainfall events-hurricane Odile).

The following maps show the precipitation totals during Monsoon Season for New Mexico State, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces, NM.



Map 1: New Mexico total precipitation during Monsoon Season. Mapped by Yizhi Zhao from NM State Climatologist Office.

Map 2: Rainfall across Albuquerque area during Monsoon Season. Mapped by Yizhi Zhao from NM State Climatologist Office.

Map 3: Rainfall across Las Cruces Area during Monsoon Season. Mapped by Yizhi Zhao from NM State Climatologist Office.

The following graphs show accumulated precipitation for Albuquerque and Las Cruces.

 

Figure 1: Accumulated Precipitation. Weather station: Albuquerque International Airport, NM.  Graph from scacis.rcc-acis.org.

 

 

Figure 2: Accumulated Precipitation. Weather station: Las Cruces Municipal Airport, NM. In September 15^th-18^th, hurricane Odile and moisture from the remnants produced heavy rainfall and caused flooding over the Baja California area and the southwestern United States. The weather station in Las Cruces Municipal Airport registered almost three inches of rainfall for this event.  Graph from scacis.rcc-acis.org.

According to the 2014 North American Monsoon (NAM) Outlook for central and northern New Mexico, a key factor that influenced this Monsoon season was the massive volume of anomalously warm water in the equatorial Pacific Region (2014 North American Monsoon (NAM) Outlook for central and northern New Mexico).

Although these rainfall events caused flood and difficulties, is important to mention that it, by the other side, improved the drought conditions is some zones of New Mexico (Last week rainfall events-hurricane Odile).