Data could help guide crop planning, fire management, flood risks
As farmers and ranchers continue to endure droughts, invasive species and axis deer impacts, a new tool is being added to better understand and forecast Hawai‘i’s complex weather patterns.
New weather stations are being installed across the state in collaboration with the Water Resource and Research Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, allowing farmers, ranchers and others to soon gain access to more climate data.
Once the Hawai‘i Mesonet Weather Station Network project is complete, there will be about 100 new weather stations statewide, including 18 on Maui, 10 on Molokai, four on Lanai and a few on Kahoolawe.
A concrete footing is currently set at the Pi‘iholo location and the tower should arrive next week.
“With the mesonet weather stations, we will have a better finger on the climate changes among the microclimates in Maui County, and for our actual forage research being done here, we’ll have the climatic conditions, the soil moisture, all of the precision tools to help us better refine our experimental approaches and make better management decisions,” said Kyle Caires, animal scientist and Maui County livestock extension agent.
During the annual National Association of Conservation Districts Pacific and Southwest Region event, farmers, ranchers, businesses owners and conservationists from across the nation took a field trip on Thursday to an experiment station in Pi‘iholo, home to the East Maui Watershed Partnership and members of Maui County’s CTAHR.
Built in the 1910s as the first-ever location for dairy and forage research in the state, the small Pi‘iholo station has since been utilized for several experiments to better support the livestock industry, Caires explained.
Now, in the next six months, tests for the new Hawai‘i Mesonet Weather Station Network will take place, said hydrologist Chris Schuler on Thursday to the crowd of attendees.
Schuler said that these towers will monitor about 20 variables to measure evapotranspiration — the process of water moving from the land to the atmosphere — and create daily soil moisture grid maps. Some of the variables include rainfall rates, solar radiation, air temperature, humidity, wind speed and soil moisture.
“This data informs our hydrology studies, but it’s also going to be put out on the internet in a publicly accessible data portal, that we already have up, to inform all other users, whether that’s agricultural users, irrigation scheduling, crop planning, things like, all the way to fire management people looking at humidity and drought conditions,” he said.
It’s no secret that farmers and ranchers across Maui County have been facing challenges with accessing water to nurture the land, which have led to losses in crops or reductions in livestock, and prompted efforts to control erosion, overpopulated axis deer and feral ungulates, and invasive species.
Whether the farmer is growing crops, raising sheep or breeding cattle, the goal is to provide farmers and ranchers with the data, resources and decision support needed to have a sustainable business, Caires said.
But, CTAHR’s experimental projects with cover crops have continued to be “wiped out” by deer — around 620 of them — that stampede through the station’s property every night, he said.
In the meantime, CTAHR has been collecting data on the recovery rates of forage and grasses, as well as understanding how much the deer are actually eating, which has been an important ongoing study, he added.
If left unmanaged, there will be no regrowth of feed.
“The deer take what they want,” said Caires, adding that there needs to be a statewide management plan. “The axis deer pressure is insane.”
In conjunction with controlling the axis deer population, the mesonet system can better help farmers with more precise crop planning and grazing, for example.
The Hawai‘i Mesonet Weather Station Network stations will record in 5-minute time intervals and create data. The triangular base aluminum towers are between 10 to 12 feet. The rain gauge will be mounted on a separate pole at most stations.
The statewide project received a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, which is the first time the NSF has funded a mesonet system under the Major Research Instrumentation Program, according to UH.
Due to inflation and shipping rates, it costs about $20,000 for one weather station. The pandemic also delayed the project a bit, Schuler said, so the new timeline is about six months until the mesonet is fully functioning.
Long-term maintenance plans include partnering with community members, but a UH team will provide technical expertise, training and guidance for those who will conduct routine station maintenance about every three months.
When more technical issues arise, there will be on-call technicians to help with more complex tasks and diagnosing station malfunctions.
In the future, the UH team will eventually be able to predict the probability of thunderstorms and identify water basin storage thresholds to better estimate the risk of flooding in low-lying areas.
Upcoming projects at the Pi‘iholo site include installing fencing to protect the property; bringing in sheep to support and produce genetic material; weeding and restoring the land; conducting the Maui Pork Improvement Program; studying bulls for genetic cryopreservation; and continuing research on feed that’s both undesirable to deer, but edible for livestock, and resilient to climate change, Caires said.
Trying to compile and publish forage and legume data collected from about 30 to 40 trials that began in February of 2018 is another project in the works.
“We have a variety of projects aimed at improving livestock production here and a lot of them center around developing new feed stuffs to support the livestock industry, which includes forage and legume research,” Caires said. “We want to execute projects that help farmers and ranchers stay in business, and that’s on the genetics side, on the management side, on the forage and feed stuff side. We need them here, we want to keep them in business.”
Photos MATTHEW THAYER, Maui News. Article by Dakota Grossman. Maui News article can be found Here.