Overview

Natural resource managers often use weather and climate information to make land management decisions. While technological advancements in data acquisition and processing have led to an increase in the amount of online, climate-based tools and databases, these tools often require substantial time investment on the part of managers and are ultimately left underutilized.

This project aims to improve access to weather and climate information and increase its utilization by working directly with managers to learn what types of information they currently use and to identify information gaps. Through a collaborative process, highly-specialized and customized reports are designed for their land management units using open source code and readily available data. The main thrust of this project is to develop a code base of R scripts that access, process and visualize these different datasets. With flexible and adaptable code, custom reports can be quickly developed and adapted for any land management unit and updated frequently. Ultimately, this code base can be deployed to automatically generate and push numerous reports at frequent intervals to managers working in different management units as a climate service or adapted and run in-house by managers themselves.

Find out more about this project Browse the reports Watch tutorials

Project overview: Climate Reports for Natural Resource Management

Reports

Select a land management unit to view its latest climate report. Reports are updated regularly.

NRCS MLRAs & Tribal Lands

Major Land Resource Areas (NRCS)
Tribal Lands
  • Hopi Tribe (Coming soon)

Tutorials

Short videos on how to read, interpret, and use the climate reports. New videos are added regularly – subscribe on YouTube to be notified.

Training Videos

Project overview: Climate Reports for Natural Resource Management

A short introduction to the climate reports project and how managers use them.

September 2026
Using PRISM Data in our Custom Climate Reports

Short overview on how PRISM is created and how we use it in our reports.

September 2026
Understanding the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) - Part 1

Short overview on what the SPI means and how this index is used in the reports.

October 2026
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Video coming soon
Drought indices in the reports (SPI/SPEI)

How to interpret standardized precipitation and evapotranspiration indices.

September 2026

Contacts

Contact us with questions, comments, or suggestions – or if you’d like a custom report developed for your land management unit.

Trevor McKellar

Department of Environmental Science
tmckella@arizona.edu

Mike Crimmins

University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
crimmins@arizona.edu

Elena Greenberg

Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS)
elenagreenberg@arizona.edu

Climate Science Applications Program - University of Arizona Cooperative Extension

Last Updated: 10-28-2026  |  © 2026 The Arizona Board of Regents. All contents copyrighted. All rights reserved.