Drought Info Conduit Moving Ahead

A one-stop drought monitoring portal is moving ahead, on schedule to be on-line by this fall, say implementers of the National Integrated Drought Information System. Resources within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the lead federal agency, have been dedicated to get the project off the ground.

The NIDIS team is envisioning four “showcase features,” which are all existing products, as well as a refined set of links and access tools to information about drought on the national, state and local level, said Tim Owen, a climatologist with the National Climatic Data Center and co-chair of the Portal Development Team. The four features will be:

• The US Drought Monitor, a weekly product produced by a rotating group of nine authors, incorporates data from dozens of sources and input from more than 200 climatologists, meteorologists, hydrologists and other specialists with federal, state and local agencies. The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) has been a main partner in the Drought Monitor since it was established in 1999. It is online at http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html.
• The US Seasonal Drought Outlook, issued monthly by the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/
• The Drought Impact Reporter, currently available as a prototype at the NDMC: http://droughtreporter.unl.edu. It graphs media reports of drought’s impacts and is the only national database or archive of drought impacts in the United States. The next version will look better, will emphasize a greater variety of information sources, and will include an easy-to-find list of current drought-related disaster declarations and relief and mitigation programs.
• A fourth product, possibly rotating, such as streamflow information.

Four specialized teams are working on the portal, Owen said: Web Information Technology, Geographic Information Systems, Outreach & Education, and Conceptual and Social Design. Development of the NIDIS portal and monitoring effort is expected to be a multi-agency, multi-year effort, with separate products such as the four showcase features gradually becoming “interoperable,” available through the same GIS interface.

Paralleling developing of the NIDIS portal, NOAA is installing 121 soil moisture and temperature sensors, which will augment the US Department of Agriculture’s Soil Climate Analysis Network soil moisture monitoring network.

Mark Svoboda, an NDMC climatologist who is also a co-chair of the NIDIS Portal Development Team and a member of the external NIDIS Implementation Team, said that the portal will be a conduit of drought early warning information for the public. He noted that to the extent that drought forecasts are possible, they will be available via the portal, but that equally important parts of the effort will be monitoring precipitation and other indicators of water supply, and education and planning information that will highlight best practices to promote drought-resilience.

Back to DroughtScape Spring 2007