Agricultural Data Helping Develop Tools For Crop Disease Management

The North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network—known as NDAWN—isn't just measuring precipitation amounts and temperatures across the state. It's also playing a role in developing tools for crop disease management.

Potato growers funded weather stations in the early 1990s specifically to support late blight modeling, and the model's success provided early validation and momentum for broader expansion. Cercospora forecasting for sugarbeets also emerged from related research conducted during the same period.

NDAWN was established in 1989 with a grant from the High Plains Climate Center, which serves six states and aims to increase the use and availability of climate data and information. It began with six automatic weather stations across North Dakota. Nearly four decades later, there are 250 such automated stations across North Dakota, Minnesota and northeastern Montana.

"It provides high-quality, localized weather and soil data tailored primarily for agriculture but useful across many sectors," says Daryl Ritchison, who has been the director of NDAWN for a decade and is also the state's climatologist.