Fast Facts:
Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Stations help with weather observations
Rohwer station reports more than 19 inches in 48-hour period.
ROHWER — The Rohwer Research Station in Desha County is known for hosting row crop variety trials as well as pest management and soil fertility experiments. This week it earned a bit of notoriety in another field: weather.
The 19.22 inches of rain recorded at the Rohwer Research Station in Desha County on Tuesday morning represented the second-highest rain total ever recorded in Arkansas during a 48-hour period, according to the National Weather Service. The deluge came during a week of persistent storms that prompted flood and tornado warnings across Arkansas. The one 48-hour rain total ahead of Rohwer’s is the 21.45 inches of rain that fell over two days ending Dec. 4, 1982.
The Rohwer Research Station is one of thousands of locations across the United States that are part of the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program. Formed in 1890, the program’s mission is to provide weather data including the daily maximum and minimum temperatures and 24-hour precipitation totals.
“All of this goes into the climate records we keep across Arkansas,” said Sean Clarke, observation program leader for the National Weather Service at Little Rock. “This is how we determine the normals for each state. It’s valuable data for us to have climate data across many years and keep track of it.
“The day-to-day observations are also useful for determining river flooding (levels) and the issuing of river flood warnings as well,” he said. “This also goes into the drought monitor. The data is used to determine what the levels of drought are by the rainfall amounts.”
Rohwer is part of a collection of facilities around Arkansas that perform the land grant research function within the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Clarke said his office has been working with the experiment stations for decades. In addition to Rohwer, the weather service gets daily measurements from the Fruit Research Station in Clarksville, the Rice Research and Extension Center in Stuttgart and the Livestock and Forestry Research Station at Batesville. Clarke also said the campus police department at the University of Arkansas at Monticello is also part of the Cooperative Observer Program.