Botetourt County, amid much controversy over a data center coming to the county’s business park, has appointed a commission to study the county’s water supply.
That would seem to lead to the question of where water ultimately comes from; the Roanoke Valley’s biggest water source, Carvins Cove, is particularly susceptible to the vagaries of rainfall.
If Botetourt’s new water commission wants some outside expert to evaluate the region’s climate trends, it now has a place where it can turn: the state’s new climate office at George Mason University.
One of the many provisions in the new state budget is one that creates a State Climate Office, to be housed at GMU.
The word “climate” is a red flag for some and when smoke from Canadian wildfires was clouding our skies last month, there was chatter in some circles online that it was absurd to have a state climate office when the climate is much bigger than that. While it’s true that climate doesn’t respect political boundaries, that criticism is a misunderstanding of what a state climate office does — and how Virginia really has lots of microclimates.
We can see the effects of that closeup in the Roanoke Valley, where Carvins Cove and Spring Hollow — the Western Virginia Water Authority’s second-biggest water source — often react in different ways. Why do we even have a valleywide water authority? It’s because in the late 1990s and early 2000s the localities’ water systems weren’t connected. Roanoke was running short on water when Carvins Cove was drained low by a drought, while Roanoke County had plenty of water from Spring Hollow because it depends on the Roanoke River, which has a wider watershed. We’re currently in a drought overall, but water levels at Carvins Cove and Spring Hollow have been reacting differently. Only three times in the past four decades has Carvins Cove been this low, while Spring Hollow has seen about a dozen other years lower than this. Those are examples of microclimates in action, and if we want to understand the valley’s water supply, we need to understand how two microclimates work and why they might be different.
That takes us from the receding shorelines of Carvins Cove to University Drive in Fairfax County — with a stop along the way in Charlottesville.
Virginia had a climate office once before, from the mid-1970s (set up at the University of Virginia by Gov. John Dalton, a Republican) until 2021, when the state’s official climatologist at the time retired and, in the words of a school spokesperson, “the university’s advocacy for state funding in the years since has focused on other priority areas.”
Further up the road, George Mason University is a rising power among Virginia universities. In 2023, it created the Virginia Climate Center, thanks to some “congressionally directed” funding introduced by then-Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Fairfax County.
That center embarked on producing a 98-page assessment of the Virginia climate in 2025, which the school describes as “the commonwealth’s first comprehensive, peer-reviewed evaluation of how changing climate conditions affect Virginia and its people.” The cover of that report was a photo of McAfee Knob in Roanoke County. “Virginia is a climatically diverse state comprised of 27 different ecoregions and 6 climate divisions,” the report said. “Changes in temperature, humidity, and wind produce different impacts on these regions simultaneously, emphasizing the importance of local and regional data collection and strategic planning.”
One of the things the report urged was for the state to reestablish a state climate office so Virginia could have someone collecting that local data and making use of it. At the time, Virginia was one of just two states without an official climate office; Arkansas was the other holdout. That led to Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County, introducing a budget amendment to declare George Mason the state’s official climate office, and, ultimately, my recent interview with the two professors who run the office: James Kinter and Luis Ortiz, both from the atmospheric, ocean and earth sciences faculty.
One of the things they stressed is that Virginia needs more weather stations. The National Weather Service focuses on broader events, they said, but the state needs a “mesonet,” a network of automated stations to fill in the regional gaps to help better understand climate at a smaller scale. North Carolina has 50 such mesonet stations through its climate office, Kinter says. “We’re basically in a data desert. It’s very hard to make inferences” at the local level without more localized data.
Figuring out how to set that up — when the state budget authorized the office but didn’t fund it — will be one of the top priorities. “It’s very important to have an observational network that covers those kinds of small areas,” Kinter says. “That mesonet could be incredibly valuable, particularly for issuing flash flood alerts.” That’s a topic of great interest in mountainous areas of western Virginia, where storms can be particularly localized.
That underscores a key point Kinter and Ortiz want to make: This is a state office that will work statewide, even if it’s located at a school not known (yet) for its statewide mission. That status is changing; the state budget this year also authorized George Mason to establish a partnership with Averett University in Danville for economic development-related work.
“We intend to be in close partnership with Virginia Tech through the extension service, through Old Dominion and William & Mary in looking at the coastal zone,” Kinter says.
They also envision working with state agencies and business groups, partly those in agriculture. Backyard gardeners are familiar with hardiness zones — what plants will do well where. That may make a difference for your tomato crop but it makes a much bigger difference to the ag industry, which has a lot more money at stake. “Those hardiness zones have been shifting — shifting to the north, due to the fact the planet is warming up,” Kinter says. “That’s something the climate office can help with: Where do we expect them to be in 30 to 50 years?”
Kinter and Ortz also see the climate office working with localities on “heat island” maps. In July, George Mason and the Faith Alliance for Climate Solutions organized more than 30 teams of “citizen scientists” to map heat variations in Northern Virginia around the region. Roanoke, through a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, conducted its own heat island study in 2024. “We need to know where those hot spots are, how big they are,” Kinter says, because they influence weather at the local level.
“We don’t have anything to offer today,” he says, “but by the end of this year, we’re hoping to have some data products and services online so one thing local governments should be looking to us for is things they might like — we’d really like to hear from them what research or questions are yanking their chains and making the mayor lose sleep. We essentially have a blank slate.”
That’s where things like Botetourt’s water study comes in. “That’s exactly the type of thing where the climate office could be useful,” Ortiz says. “One of the things that the state climate office can do is serve as a bridge between the data created by the federal government and the state government.”
Local governments who want more weather data, or are interested in helping set up some of those mesonet weather stations, should contact Kinter or Ortiz through the Virginia Climate Center.
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