New Jersey: Water-Resource Management and Weather Monitoring

When the South Jersey Resource Conservation and Development Council (SJRC&D) was challenged to provide a fast and convenient irrigation water management plan to area farmers and, later, to area homeowners, Campbell Scientific, Inc., (CSI) quickly entered the picture. It was 1993 and the council was building the foundation for its Resource Information Serving Everyone (RISE) network. The network’s primary focus was, and remains, agricultural water conservation, but grew into a multifunctional undertaking when a secondary objective of fulfilling an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requirement for an in-kind local water-conservation project near a Superfund Site, and later an objective addressing watershed modeling, were added. RISE stations are currently distributed throughout 8 of New Jersey’s 11 southern counties. Now, with a total of 17 weather stations and four water-quality stations spanning much of southern New Jersey, CSI remains at the heart of a system upon which water managers, farmers, homeowners, and researchers have learned to depend.