Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere's Precipitable Water Products
The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere's (CIRA's) precipitable water products are transitioned by SPoRT. Each card on this page represents a facet of those products. Items on green cards, marked as "Evaluation Product," are being used by at least one National Weather Service Forecast Office. Items on blue cards, marked as "Research," are still in development, or exist mainly for academic purposes. To see actual real-time data, click the link at the bottom right of the card.
For more information, see the CIRA Overview at the bottom of this page.
CIRA Products Overview
The total precipitable water products are developed by John Forsythe, Stanley Kidder, and Andrew Jones at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) as well as Sheldon Kusselson at NOAA NESDIS / Satellite Analysis Branch in Washington D.C. CIRA has partnered with the SPoRT Center to use SPoRT's expertise in transitioning products to the National Weather Service. This partnership has allowed CIRA to transition two total precipitable water products and the suite of layered precipitable water products to SPoRT's partner National Weather Service offices for evaluation and comment. A key component of this partnership is SPoRT's knowledge of transitioning products to the forecaster's native display environment, AWIPS/AWIPS-II. A major emphasis of CIRA is to create observation based products that can provide information in traditionally data poor regions, such as the oceans. This feature has made the precipitable water products widely popular with SPoRT's coastal National Weather Service partners. Each of the total PW products are available every six hours and has a 10 km resolution, while the layered PW product suite updates every three hours and is mapped to a 16 km Mercator grid.
For more information about the Colorado Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, visit CIRA Home Page.
