New CIMIS Weather Station Installed at Shasta College

DATE:           June 3, 2013

CONTACT:     Leimone Waite, 530-242-2210

RELEASE:      FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A new (CIMIS) weather station has been installed at Shasta College 

REDDING, CA – A new California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS) weather station has been installed at Shasta College (#224) and is now on-line and providing accurate data to assist agricultural and landscape irrigators to accurately schedule irrigation applications.  Efficient use of water resources benefits Californians by saving water, energy, and money.

The new station installation and ongoing maintenance is through a cooperative agreement between the Bella Vista Water District, Shasta College and the California Department of Water Resources with funding through a WaterSmart Grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation awarded to the Bella Vista Water District.

The California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS) is a program in the Office of Water Use Efficiency (OWUE), California Department of Water Resources (DWR) that presently manages a network of 238 automated weather stations in the state of California.  CIMIS was initially developed in 1982 by the California Department of Water Resource and the University of California at Davis to assist California's irrigators manage their water resources efficiently.

Since the beginning of the CIMIS weather station network in 1982, the primary purpose of CIMIS was to make available to the public, free of charge, information useful in accurately estimating crop water use for irrigation scheduling purposes.  Although irrigation scheduling continues to be the main use of CIMIS, uses have expanded to include the timing of new plantings as well as fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide applications. In addition to calculated reference evapotranspiration (ETo), data includes daily and hourly precipitation, solar radiation, minimum, maximum and average temperatures, soil temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction.

The Email Scheduler is a convenient feature of CIMIS that enables users to receive CIMIS data automatically via email.  The Email Scheduler is accessed on the CIMIS website, where users fill in a form specifying the desired CIMIS information and it will be delivered automatically to the requested email address.  Users only need to fill in the form one time in order to receive automatic updates.

For more information, or to access or sign up for emailed data, please visit:  http://wwwcimis.water.ca.gov/cimis/welcome.jsp

Or call:

Don Groundwater, District Engineer, Bella Vista Water District                  (530) 241-1085

Leimone Waite, Horticulture Instructor, Shasta College                            (530) 242-2210

Jamie Dubay, Associate Land and Water Use Scientist, DWR                    (530) 528-7448