What's New

What’s New

November 2006

Breaking News

The Vegetation Drought Response Index – VegDRI – has just concluded its 2006 season as a semi-operational biweekly product, and researchers are planning refinements and looking for feedback
VegDRI shows drought’s effects on vegetation during the growing season, which can be useful to farmers, ranchers, and other decision-makers and planners. So far it has been generated for a seven-state region of the northern Great Plains, including Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and Nebraska.
            To view it, please visit http://gisdata.usgs.gov/website/Drought_Monitoring. The maps display data as one-square-kilometer pixels, although for now it is mainly intended to be used as a regional monitoring tool rather than a local-level product. The VegDRI captures more spatial detail than traditional drought monitoring tools such as the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) (http://drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html), which will allow more localized drought to be mapped and monitored at state and regional scales.
            VegDRI highlights the impact of drought on vegetation by combining climate data, satellite-derived information about vegetation conditions, and other environmental variables such as land cover type and soil characteristics. Over the next year, researchers will be evaluating new and improved information sources to enhance the current operational VegDRI product. In addition, the VegDRI coverage will be expanded to eight more states -- Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin -- in the spring of 2007.
            Evaluation of the current VegDRI products is a critical part of improving this tool and providing useful information to the general public. Researchers need feedback from farmers, ranchers, government officials, and scientists regarding the overall utility of VegDRI as a way to map and monitor drought conditions. The developers would also like to know what related products users need, such as maps, tables and graphs. User feedback will play a pivotal role in future development of the VegDRI tool and interested individuals are encouraged to participate in this evaluation process.
            The project is a collaboration between the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), the US Geological Survey’s Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS), and the High Plains Regional Climate Center (HPRCC), with sponsorship from the US Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA).
            Main researchers working on VegDRI are Dr. Brian Wardlow and Dr. Tsegaye Tadesse at the NDMC, and Jesslyn Brown with SAIC at EROS.
Future plans are to develop VegOUT – the Vegetation Outlook – which will provide outlooks for general vegetation conditions over two, four, and six weeks into the future. The VegOUT concept considers the current vegetation conditions shown in VegDRI and uses historical relationships between climate, ocean temperatures, and vegetation to provide outlooks for general vegetation conditions later in the growing season. Researchers will investigate the ideal blend of data inputs to produce a VegOUT product that yields the most reliable outlooks.
If you would like to be involved in evaluating VegDRI, please contact Brian Wardlow, bwardlow2@unl.edu.

Mexico Hosts North American Drought Monitor Workshop

           Incremental improvements to the monthly North American Drought Monitor (NADM) were the focus of the workshop hosted by Mexico’s Servicio Meteorologico Nacional October 18-19, 2006, in Mexico City. The product’s authors and contributing experts meet every two years, rotating between the United States, Mexico and Canada.
            Among those attending were Drought Monitor authors Mark Svoboda and Brian Fuchs, both climatologists at the National Drought Mitigation Center. Mr. Svoboda gave a presentation on “New Tools for Monitoring and Assessing Drought.”
           “The collaborative work of all three countries continues to improve upon the North American Drought Monitor, making it an even more viable product,” Fuchs said. “Higher quality and more timely data will allow for a product that will provide information that can improve the way drought is handled in all three countries. Each country has its own challenges in improving the USDM and communication will continue to be key in making the North American Drought Monitor an even better product in the future.”
           Presentations as well as concluding recommendations and action items are linked from the workshop website at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2006/nadm-workshop/nadm-workshop06mexcty.php.
           Among the recommendations were to see whether certain satellite-based US Geological Survey products could be expanded to include Mexico; to see whether NDMC products such as the Decision Support System and the Drought Impacts Reporter could expand to include Mexico and Canada (where data are available); to provide technical assistance so that Mexican authors can be more hands-on in drawing GIS shapefiles; and to seek additional resources to make the product more robust. Advocates for the NADM will recommend a Drought Information System for the Americas at subsequent meetings and conferences.
           This year, not surprisingly, the majority of the conference’s approximately 80 participants were from Mexico. Sessions were conducted with simultaneous translation. The product itself is issued in English, Spanish and French.
           The NADM was first launched in 2002-2003, with the first publicly available version released in March 2003. One of the authors’ goals is to improve the timeliness of the product. Currently, the NADM is issued by the 16th of every month, reflecting conditions through the end of the previous month.

Drought Preparedness Messages to Congress

           The United States can and must do a better job of preparing for drought.
           That’s what Don Wilhite, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Congress in late September.
            Wilhite was conveying a consensus that emerged from a drought conference he led in Longmont, Colo., September 18-20.
            Climate change raises a strong possibility that droughts will be longer and more intense than anything most of us have experienced, especially in the western half of the country. Population increases and land use changes mean that we will feel the effects of drought more acutely, he said.
            Wilhite’s testimony, part of an effort by the Congressional Hazards Caucus, was in support of two pending pieces of legislation.
           The first is the National Drought Preparedness Act which would, in the words of the Western Governors’ Association (WGA), “Put in place a comprehensive national drought policy that statutorily authorizes a lead federal agency for drought, and delineates the roles and responsibilities for coordinating and integrating federal assistance for droughts. It would move the country away from the costly, ad-hoc, response-oriented approach to drought, and move us toward a proactive, preparedness approach, similar to what we have for other natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes.”
            The second would create the National Integrated Drought Information System, which the WGA says would “Provide water users across the board – farmers, ranchers, utilities, tribes, land managers, business owners, recreationalists, wildlife managers, and decision-makers at all levels of government – with the ability to assess their drought risk in real time and before the onset of drought, in order to make informed decisions that may mitigate a drought’s impacts.”
Wilhite organized the Colorado conference, titled “Managing Drought and Water Scarcity in Vulnerable Environments: Creating a Roadmap for Change in the United States” in cooperation with the Geological Society of America and others. About 215 people from all over the country attended.
            NDMC is part of UNL’s School of Natural Resources.
            Wilhite and other conference organizers are currently drafting “The Roadmap for Change” which is expected to be ready next spring, in time for the next round of discussion on a national drought policy.
            Before heading to Washington, D.C., he condensed three days of scholarly and policy-oriented discussion from the conference into six takeaway messages for Congress:

Increase understanding of the ‘drought hazard’ and how it may be changing in frequency, severity, and duration. This would involve better monitoring, better understanding of past droughts through techniques such as paleo-climatology, and more use of projections of the effects of climate change.
Improve our understanding of how societal vulnerability to drought is changing. Factors that increase the effects of drought include population growth, urbanization and other land use changes, and greater awareness of environmental effects.
Place more emphasis on managing the risks associated with drought. Dr. Wilhite advocated a transition from relief programs to a risk management approach, in which agricultural producers provided with the very best available information would knowingly take calculated risks. He added that relief programs reinforce the status quo and reward lack of planning.
Improve our assessment of the broad range of drought impacts. We know that agriculture is only one of the sectors affected by drought, but its larger social, environmental and economic effects are not well-documented.
Develop a national drought policy that outlines the principles for reducing societal vulnerability to drought. It would include monitoring, risk assessment, planning, and improved coordination between all levels of government. This idea isn’t new: The Government Accounting Office recommended a national drought plan in 1980.
Create a new ‘National Water Culture” that would promote sustainable water management practices.

Calendar: Presentations & Conferences

November 1, 2006, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Dr. Cody Knutson will present New Decision-Support Tools for Climate and Vegetation Assessment: GreenLeaf and VegDRI, for the New Mexico Association of Conservation Districts.

November 2, Australia. Dr. Don Wilhite will do a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company's National Interest program on drought.

November 3, Canberra, Australia. Dr. Don Wilhite will make a presentation to the Australian Bureau of Resource Sciences.

November 3, 2006, Lincoln, NE. Dr. Mike Hayes will make a presentation to the Nebraska LEAD Program on the National Drought Mitigation Center. The Leadership Education/Action Development program is a three-day conference "to prepare and motivate men and women in agriculture for more effective leadership," sponsored by the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

November 7, 2006, Lincoln, NE. Meghan Sittler and Bob Kuzelka will present "Application of Adaptive and Collaborative Management Techniques in a Water-related Setting" at the 51st annual Midwest Ground Water Conference at 2 p.m. at the Embassy Suites. For more information on the conference, please visit http://snr.unl.edu/midwest/agenda.asp

October 31-November 4, 2006, Australia. Dr. Donald A. Wilhite will be consulting with the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne on drought monitoring issues.

November 14-15, Washington, D.C. Dr. Mike Hayes and Mark Svoboda will participate in a leadership meeting of the National Integrated Drought Information System at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They’ll also be meeting with Eldon Gould, Administrator of the Risk Management Agency.

November 13, 2006, Washington, D.C. Dr. Cody Knutson will be participating in a National Research Council workshop to review NOAA's Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP).

November 16, 2006, Lincoln, NE. Presentation of thesis research by master’s student Melissa Melvin, Hardin Hall, 901, 1:30 p.m. Topic: “Collecting and reporting drought
impacts at the state-level: Experiences, lessons learned, and guidelines for improvement.”

Mid-November. Several Jordanian scientists will be visiting the NDMC as part of a Technical Cooperation Project funded by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization to develop a national drought strategy and action plan for the country. Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, director of the NDMC, is serving as the International Team Leader for this project. The visitor list is still being finalized but will probably include representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Center for Agricultural Research and Technology Transfer, and the Meteorological Department.

November 20, 2006, Lincoln, NE. Presentation of dissertation research by Donna Woudenberg, Hardin Hall, 901, 9 a.m. Topic: “Drought Perception on the Great Plains and Related Sociological Impacts.”

November 29, 2006, Lincoln, Nebraska. Dr. Cody Knutson will present Lessons Learned from the 2000-2005 Drought: What Ranchers Said in Recent Surveys, to the Nebraska Cattlemen - Cattlemen’s College.