Montana Climate Office Adds 37 New Monitoring Stations in 2024

MISSOULA – 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.

The 2024 build season began on May 15 with the Springdale station 17 miles west of Big Timber. The 2024 station installations spanned three tribal reservations, five months, seven watershed districts and 15 counties. They added 18,000 square miles of meteorological coverage across the state. Construction concluded on Oct. 19 with the Woodhawk station 60 miles southeast of Havre.

The Montana Mesonet receives funding through the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Active since 2016, the project employs 20 people who engineer station design, handle project budget and logistics, coordinate public outreach, and maintain and build the stations.

Enhanced Drought Monitoring

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.

Serving Tribal Nations

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.

Tribal land historically is underrepresented among environmental monitoring networks, leading to potential inequities in early disaster warning and federal assistance. With these new stations, Hoylman said, tribal governments and residents will be empowered to make better informed decisions about land and water use, conservation and management of environmental and cultural resources.

Installation of the Montana Mesonet stations were included as essential monitoring infrastructure in the 2022 Fort Peck Tribal Drought Management Plan and 2023 Disaster Mitigation Plan. The Fort Peck Reservation received eight of the stations, greatly increasing monitoring across the agricultural lands in the northern half of the reservation while adding capacity in the more populated southern half.

Michael Black Wolf, tribal historic preservation officer for the Fort Belknap Reservation, highlighted the utility of the data for the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes.

“I think there’s going to be multiple applications in which this will be beneficial to the tribes here,” Black Wolf said. “I see that (the Mesonet) has that potential for great uses and applications at (Aaniiih Nakoda College) and even, I would say, at our high school level. Our local high schools will be able to use that real time data. But what really makes it all the more useful is it’s going to be literally weather from right in our backyards and so, you know, being able to analyze and access that kind of weather data will really be helpful.”

Training UM Students

In addition to its professional staff, the Montana Mesonet employs UM undergraduate students as hydrologic technicians. Hoylman said these students gain valuable career skills and further their knowledge of Montana’s environment, up-to-date scientific tools and technology, and project coordination.

“My experience working for the MCO has been very helpful in determining what I want to work on in the future,” said Ethan Jones, a UM forestry major and Montana Mesonet seasonal technician. “Working for the MCO has not only increased my experience in performing various types of fieldwork with a variety of different tools and equipment, but also working with people. Interacting with landowners always offered new knowledge about things I didn’t know and their interest in what we were doing helped me describe it better. Overall, working for the MCO has been one of my favorite summers working in college so far.”

A Community-Driven Network

The Montana Mesonet would not be possible without the support of local landowners, community organizations, Montana State University Extension and local conservation districts. The Montana Mesonet partners with private landowners to host most of its stations.

Among the HydroMet stations, 67% of stations are on private land, 21% are on tribal reservations, 10% are on public land and 2% are hosted by nongovernmental organizations. In 2024, 23 stations were built on private land and 14 on Tribal reservations. MSU Extension, conservation districts and tribal governments were essential partners in identifying hosts for the 2024 Mesonet installations.

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.

Mesonet data is ingested in the Upper Missouri Rive Basin Drought Indicators Dashboard, which guides drought assessment in Montana and in several other states on a weekly basis. Data also is automatically delivered to the National Weather Service, where they are incorporated into regional forecasts. A Montana Mesonet mobile app is under development.

The Montana Mesonet team is already busy preparing for the 2025 season and beyond. Thirty-nine new Mesonet stations are scheduled for installation in 2025, and an additional 39 were proposed for installation in 2026. A live status map of the Montana Mesonet HydroMet build out is available ONLINE. The project is actively seeking partner hosts for the 2027 build season.

Your Montana Climate Office

The Montana Climate Office provides high-quality, timely, relevant and scientifically based climate, drought and water resources information and services to Montanans. As Montana’s official climate data stewards, the office provides information for specific sectors of interest by either geography or industry and assists stakeholders in adapting climate products to their needs.

The MCO is housed in the Montana Forest and Conservation Experiment Station, part of UM’s W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation. Dr. Kelsey Jencso, the W.A. Franke Endowed Professor of Watershed Hydrology and state climatologist, directs the office and the Montana Mesonet.

Jencso said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers established the Upper Missouri River Basin Network in response to the historic 2011 and 2014 Missouri floods. When completed in 2028, the network will be among the densest meteorological, soil moisture and snowpack monitoring networks in the world, consisting of 540 stations across central and eastern Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska – a density of one station for every 500 square miles.

“Home to the Missouri headwaters, our Montana Mesonet will play an integral part in the management of the Basin’s land and water resources,” Jencso said.