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Show 21 Mr. CANNON. Thank you, Dr. Potter. Mr. Eubank. STATEMENT OF MARK EUBANK, METEOROLOGIST WITH CHANNEL 5, KSL TV, UTAH; PAST PRESIDENT, UTAH METEOROLOGICAL ASSOCIATION; ADJUNCT PROFESSOR, WESTMINSTER COLLEGE Mr. EUBANK. First of all, thank you for the privilege of being here and having a chance to address this group. Let me say that it's my goal to speak in a unified voice for all the meteorologists in Utah. There is something I think your group needs to know and that is that the data that's used for predicting the weather is put out by the National Weather Service, part of the Department of Commerce. It is their tools that make this country work. Now, there's a big private sector and I am part of that with the television group. We're just the face. We are the face of dissemination but it's those tools, the Doppler radar, the satellites, the computer modeling that government supplies and puts out for the people that makes this thing work. I think that's important. I have divided my remarks into two parts, the short- term prediction and the long- term prediction. For a short- term prediction you have to monitor, you have to know what's going on, and the two basic things with droughts, especially in the west, is rainfall and snow. In the East it doesn't make a huge difference how much snow you get, it's the rain for the year, but in the west it's our cold season snow. If we don't get it, that hurts us badly. So rainfall, snow water, snow depth, temperature, soil moisture, reservoir levels and well levels. If you can monitor that, then you can know what the short- term is going to do. In Utah, in our mountains, there are 143 sites that measure the snow. Sixty of those are still done manually. They have to have snowmobiles or helicopters, you have manpower expenses, you have equipment expense, and, why? Because we have never funded the automatic- we haven't finished funding the automatic equipment. Automatic equipment for the other 83 stations sends it back here every 15 minutes and we get reports back to the computers anywhere in the state or anywhere in the country via the Internet. The other problem is the soil moisture. You can have a big snowpack but if your soil, like a sponge, is dry- whoosh- a lot of it goes into the soil rather than run off. Out of the 143 sites, only six have soil moisture probes. And that's a crime. We need to fix that and that's something that this Science Committee, you need to be aware of, that all the western states need to better monitor the soil moisture conditions. When you get right into the actual predictions, there are models that measure the- they can predict the snow melt runoff. The timing of the storms, even though we get little storms in the west, if they come at about a week or 10- day intervals, then the crops can survive. If you go 30 days and then you have a cloudburst, it's almost wasted. And so being able to predict the timing, or you can better control the timing, would be the best thing. The Climate Prediction Center issues 30- and 90- day outlooks and they are fairly accurate. They do a good job of helping us on that 30- and 90- day time scale. Okay. That's short- term. Long- |