By splitting the state up into three parts, each office looks more carefully at their smaller areas, and provides more accurate public, hydrologic, fire weather, and aviation forecasts, and more timely updates when needed. With the smaller areas of concern, and the explosion in technology, which allows us to look at data we only dreamed of seeing before, we believe the forecasts for every corner of Colorado are improving. Because of our incomplete knowledge of the weather processes that occur over Colorado, and the complex terrain, the forecasts aren't perfect, but we've seen steady increases in our knowledge and improvement in the details of the forecasts. Certainly, from a political standpoint, the southern Colorado office could have been located in the biggest population center. But, with regard to geography and meteorology, the logical choice was Pueblo.
Pueblo is near the geographical center of our area of responsibility.
The place to put the Doppler radar to achieve optimum coverage in our area was in Pueblo county. Colorado Springs is within the distance ranges of optimum radar coverage. Since my arrival here, we have increased the number of official NWS weather spotters from around 200 to over 900. You are our eyes that help verify and fine tune information that our technology is showing us at the computer workstations in the Pueblo office. Chiefly for the above reasons, the nerve-center for southern Colorado weather forecasting was positioned in Pueblo county, near the Pueblo Municipal Airport.