On this day, the real-time info is helping forecasters track a winter storm. Longer term, the measurements will fill enormous datasets used for climate science, agriculture, industry and government.

As scientists get more and better data on earth's changing climate, there's a push to use it to help people cope with the effects of climate change. The recent National Climate Assessment urged states to follow Oklahoma's lead and create early warning systems to help communities prepare and adapt.

"We're not only collecting the data every five minutes, but we're trying to get it out to the decision-makers within five minutes," says Chris Fiebrich, associate director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey who manages the Oklahoma Mesonet.

Those decisions could be small ones, like postponing a high school football game, or ones with much higher stakes, such as predicting catastrophic flooding, or drought, or modeling potential wildfire danger.

"Firefighters can know how fast a fire might spread if it were to break out today, or how high the flames might be, and that helps them preposition things or get things ready," says Fiebrich.

From information to action

"There're enormous possibilities for how we could use early warning systems to make our health systems much more effective," says Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who studies the health risks of climate change.

In Phoenix, officials are using weather and climate data to predict and prepare for deadly heat waves. In Singapore, the data are used to create a seasonal forecast for Dengue fever.

"It gives you four months notice," Ebi says. "Think of all the things that you can do in four months."

Information isn't the same thing as action, however, and Ebi says generating and making data available doesn't guarantee a decisive response.

One example she points to is a meteorological model researchers developed in 2016 that warned conditions in south Florida and south Texas could lead to more mosquitos and outbreaks of Zika virus.

Researchers published a scientific paper, which received national media coverage, "but there was essentially no significant public health response," Ebi says.

The next step, she says, is finding, funding and empowering a public response to the increasingly accurate predictions about the effects of climate change.

"There's more and more talk about climate, weather, climate change and health in the media," she says, "but we haven't seen that translate into any kind of mandate that something needs to be done."