Garrett Marietta, collections technician for the Indiana Geological and Water Survey, finishes an installation at the Jasper South weather monitoring station in late January.When residents in 12 Indiana counties want to know how weather is likely to affect their plans, they don’t have to rely on weather forecasters who might be half a state away. They can check data coming from a nearby monitoring station maintained by the Indiana Geological and Water Survey.

In early January, the survey started receiving data from its newest station, Jasper South at Cedar Crest Intermediate near Huntingburg in Dubois County. The next-newest station, Washington East at the Daviess County Highway Department near Washington, went live in November.

The Indiana Geological and Water Survey has installed and maintains 15 of these monitoring stations throughout the state, and hourly data from all of them can be viewed on a dashboard.

The other 13 stations are in Allen, Delaware, Fayette, Hendrick, Henry, Lake, Marion, Monroe, Morgan and Rush counties. Some counties have more than one station.

The stations were installed as part of the Indiana Water Balance Network, which the Indiana Geological and Water Survey initiated in 2012. Each includes equipment to measure and keep track of air temperature, humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, soil temperature, precipitation, soil moisture and groundwater level. In addition, the webpage for each station calculates potential evapotranspiration (water leaving land by evaporation and plant transpiration) using the climate data from various sensors.

Indiana Geological and Water Survey research scientists Babak Shabani and Ginger Davis see a lot of potential use for this data, including teaching students about mathematics and environmental data patterns, predicting flash flooding in vulnerable areas, and alerting farmers about good weather windows for work in fields.

Indiana Water Balance Network data can have several agricultural uses, including planting, spraying and harvesting recommendations, frost protection, irrigation scheduling, and prescribed burn advisories.

Highway staff can use soil temperature and soil moisture data to decide which pretreatment they should spread on roads and when it will be most effective, potentially saving money on road treatment material and overtime. Localized weather data also can help predict whether areas will get snow, ice or just rain.

Utility companies have asked Shabani about soil sensors at multiple depths so they can assess risk to pipes that could be damaged by extreme cold.

Friends of Lake Monroe have been using Monroe County’s potential evapotranspiration data to help determine how accurate their estimates are of nutrients and sediment in the lake. They’re working to improve water quality for the more than 130,000 people who depend on the lake for drinking water.

Weather data also can inform policymakers about where to place renewable energy sources like wind turbines or solar farms. For some of the older stations, more than 10 years of data has been collected on wind patterns and solar radiation.

Public safety and emergency management agencies could benefit from checking this data as well.

“Storm watchers all the time are looking for circular patterns in the wind, and we have wind sensors at the stations, so they can monitor that along with significant precipitation which could initiate floods,” Davis said.

One of the most valuable parts of this network is the diversity of sites where stations are collecting data, Davis said. They’ve been placed in all types of soil, in wetlands and in uplands, as far north as Gary and as far south as Jasper.

In addition, all weather monitoring stations are co-located or very close to wells that monitor groundwater. Indiana Geological and Water Survey personnel can collect data on patterns and the availability of that resource, including how much precipitation falls, soaks into the soil, runs off, migrates down to aquifers and evaporates, as well as how those figures vary according to topography, soil type and other variables.

The groundwater data also is fed to the National Ground-Water Monitoring Network.

As water access becomes an increasing concern across the nation and the world, keeping tabs on localized water cycles in cooperation with state and national monitoring agencies “makes good research, important research that can benefit all people,” Shabani said.

Sara Clifford is editor of the Indiana Geological and Water Survey and the Indiana Journal of Earth Sciences.