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Over June and July 2006, Michael Bosilovich (GMAO) mentored summer interns through the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) and NASA's Tribal College and Universities (TCU) Program. Josef Marlow and George Ackerman, an instructor and student respectively, from the Tohono O'odham Community College were interested in learning about Earth science data, specifically in regards to the Tohono O'odham Nation (abbreviated TON, located in southern Arizona and continuing into Mexico, http://www.itcaonline.com/tribes_tohono.html). The North American Monsoon brings 50% of the annual precipitation over 60-90 days during the summer. The rains greatly affect agriculture and daily life in the region.

Joe and George's summer activities focused on the recently released North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR, Mesinger et al. 2006), as well as some station observations from the Climate Prediction Center and National Climate Data Center. The NARR is useful as its relatively fine spatial resolution of 32km brings out details and features not resolved in existing global reanalyses. Also, the NARR precipitation is widely regarded as very high quality for a reanalysis product.

The links below lead to the abstracts that Joe and George wrote for their projects, as well as their presentations from July 26, 2006 on the summary of their studies and analysis. From a GMAO perspective, we were interested in the requirements for studying these features, and how we might better provide data from the forthcoming GMAO reanalysis, called the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) . While quite a bit was possible by using only the NARR DVD, additional hydrological data at the daily time scale would have also been useful.

Josef Marlow "Monsoon Onset Dates on the Tohono O'odham Nation"
+ Read Abstract
+ Download PPT

George Ackerman "Tohono O'odham Monsoon Climatology"
+ Read Abstract
+ Download PPT

Other links:

NARR

Mesinger, F. and co-authors, 2006: The North American Regional Reanalysis, Bull. Amer. Met. Soc., 87, 343-360.