SALT LAKE CITY — Captivated by wind and water since childhood, Donald T. Jensen has spent most of his 57 years hoarding every weather map, temperature list and rainfall measurement he could find.
Now his stash, and his method of tying it all together, has helped form the database of the World Water and Climate Atlas, a series of CD-ROMs.
International agricultural officials say the collection of worldwide weather conditions should help farmers, engineers, scientists and policymakers boost farm production, conserve water and possibly anticipate the effects of global warming.
"We expect scientists to find many other important applications for the atlas that we haven't even dreamed about ourselves," said Jensen, a professor at Utah State University and the state's climatologist.
Compiling global weather history into a single source was an unfulfilled goal for Jensen until just over a year ago, when a representative of the International Irrigation Management Institute walked into his Utah Climate Center on the university's campus in Logan, 68 miles north of Salt Lake City.
The institute is one of 16 research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, an organization financed by the World Bank and other private and public entities.
The institute wanted an electronic database of climate information and dispatched its consultant, Andy Keller, a Logan-based irrigation engineer, to see what Jensen had.
"I was told Don had a lot of data, but I was surprised by the amount," Keller said.
Maps of Utah hung on the walls and Jensen had used his own system of color codes to illustrate them with historical weather patterns.
"They asked if I could do that for them, and I said I'd be glad to," Jensen recalled.
Jensen then directed a project that gathered precipitation, temperature readings and other information from 56,000 weather stations around the world.
Finally, data from a 30-year period--1961-90--was transferred onto detailed maps to illustrate climate conditions for anywhere in the world.
To demonstrate, Jensen slips a CD-ROM into a computer, clicks on a world map and highlights the southern tip of India and Sri Lanka.
After selecting a series of precipitation readings for a 12-month period, a rainbow of color slowly moves across the terrain, illustrating dry seasons in shades of red and wet periods in green and blue.
