This project would fund inventory needs of the Kansas Mesonet and support temperature/humidity measurement efforts for at least the next eight years. Actual purchase and testing of instrumentation will only take several months to complete. Long term outcomes will sustain/maintain consistent, high quality temperature and humidity data collected network-wide. This will continue climate record development critical for both real-time go/no-go spray decisions and historical trends pivotal to the success of soybeans in Kansas. All recorded data can be found historical and real-time on the Kansas Mesonet’s website (mesonet.ksu.edu). Data is available free of charge to the public, government, and private interests. It will also be incorporated into Mesonet's inversion monitoring tool (mesonet.ksu.edu/agriculture/inversion) and evapotranspiration
webpage (mesonet.ksu.edu/agriculture/evapotranspiration). Data is available for on-farm research in proximity of the respective locations and utilized in outreach and training events to the public and professionals. Collected information is provided by request of the Kansas Department of Agriculture to support all off-target drift complaints in the state. Benefits will expand beyond agronomy with utilization in water budgeting, air quality analysis, wildfire prediction and many other industries.

Project Objectives include:
1. Continuing to provide supporting drift advisory data real-time to producers to avoid off-target drift scenarios. Support sustainment education of weather impacts to herbicide/pesticide applications with high quality supporting data.
2. Sustain the development of inversion climatology while providing supporting data for additional products/tools that depend on temperature and humidity data.
3. Provide supportive data for off-target drift complaints, irrigation management and heat/drought tolerance to support producer decisions while minimizing impacts to the soybean populations in Kansas.

This project addresses several Soybean Commission FY26 Request for Proposals (RFP) priorities. First it addresses Proposal Area 1. Breeding,
Production, and Environmental Programs, part A. Water Management and Water Use Efficiency by ensuring reliable evapotranspiration data is collected to ensure producers are achieving the most efficiency with irrigation. It also is critical in evaluating heat tolerance and drought resistance while sustaining critical resilience across extreme weather/climate events. This project also addresses Proposal Area 1. Breeding, Production, and Environmental Programs, part B. Best Management Practices by minimizing impact of off-target spray applications to the environment.

With over one million website views a year, Kansas soybean producers heavily rely on the Kansas Mesonet temperature and humidity data. This supports this data collection with sensor rotation and sustaining high quality measurements. These sensors typically drift with time and this ensures we can collect the same type of measurements for the next (approximately) eight years. Benefits will expand beyond agronomy with
utilization in water budgeting, air quality analysis, wildfire prediction and many other industries.