September 2006

Breaking News

Political Scientist from Down Under to Share Drought Planning Experiences

Australian drought expert Linda Botterill, a fellow in the Political Science Program in the Research School of Social Sciences at The Australian National University in Canberra will give a free public lecture on “Australia’s National Drought Policy: Promise, Problems and Prospects” on Thursday, Sept. 14 at 3 p.m. in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s East Campus Union.

The talk will focus on learning more about monitoring and allocating scarce water supplies.

Botterill is a regular commentator on drought policy for Australian media. The southern hemisphere continent is consistently the driest inhabited continent on the planet and, “Like parts of the western United States, regions of Australia have experienced several consecutive years of severe drought,” according to UNL climatologist and director of the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), Don Wilhite.

Botterill also has extensive experience in public policy development in the Australian Public Service, as a ministerial adviser and as a policy officer in two industry associations.

Her research focuses on public policy development and on the role of values and expertise in the policy process. Besides drought policy, her main research areas are rural and regional policy and food regulation. 

Her UNL presentation is part of an ongoing collaboration with the NDMC, which is part of UNL’s School of Natural Resources and Institute for Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Botterill will also speak at the coming Geological Society of America conference in Longmont, Colo., Sept. 18-20, an event organized by Wilhite. For more information, please visit the conference web site:
http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/06drought/

 

Scientists, Policy-Makers to Focus on Drought Planning

Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, worked with the Geological Society of America and others to organize Managing Drought & Water Scarcity: Roadmap for Change in the U.S., Sept. 18-20 in Longmont, Colorado.
           
For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.geosociety.org/meetings/06drought/
National Integrated Drought Info. System Implementation Meeting Sept. 21-22, 2006 Longmont, CO

 

Drought Planners Convene for NIDIS Implementation

Dr. Wilhite and others will be representing the NDMC at the National Integrated Drought Information System Implementation Plan Meeting, Sept. 21-22 in Longmont, Colorado. The meeting is open to all stakeholders. For more information, please visit the meeting website: http://www.joss.ucar.edu/joss_psg/meetings/nidis/.
           
The Western Governors Association is backing the formation of NIDIS, an initiative to improve monitoring, forecasting and early warning of drought for the western United States.

 

NDMC Signs MOU with UN Disaster Reduction Group

The National Drought Mitigation Center has agreed on a Memo of Understanding with the United Nations Secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction http://www.unisdr.org/isdrindex.htm to reduce vulnerability and promote resilience to drought. The joint effort will promote coordination, networking, exchanging expertise, developing policies and identifying simple and affordable technologies, tools and good practices for drought risk reduction.
           
Dr. Wilhite previously served as the convener of the ISDR Discussion Group on Drought, which produced a report, Drought: Living with Risk, An Integrated Approach to Reducing Societal Vulnerability.

 

Policy-Tracking: National Drought Preparedness Act of 2005

The Act was introduced in the House of Representatives on March 17, 2005 (H.R.1386), and in the Senate on April 14, 2005 (S.802). The purpose of the National Drought Preparedness Act is to establish a national drought council within the Department of Agriculture to improve national drought preparedness, mitigation, and response efforts.

The NDMC was one of several sponsors in the briefings of both the House and the Senate on April 15, 2005. Other sponsors included the Western Governors’ Association, Southern Governors’ Association, American Farm Bureau Federation, and Western States Water Council. Panel participants were Don Wilhite, director, National Drought Mitigation Center; Jack Stults, administrator, Montana Water Resources Division; Ken Crawford, director, Oklahoma Climatological Survey; and Shaun McGrath, program manager, Western Governors’ Association.

Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, Director of the NDMC, is scheduled to testify on September 27 at the Congressional Natural Hazards Caucus briefing in Washington, D.C.

Recent Results, Tools & Products

Surviving the Drought: Lessons Learned from the 2000-2005 Drought in Nebraska

Cody Knutson and Mike Hayes of the NDMC collaborated with Martin Kleinschmit of the Center for Rural Affairs, Robert Hitchcock of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Anthropology and Geography Department, and Jeffrey Peake of the Unviersity of Nebraska-Omaha Geography Department on a project funded by NOAA’s Office of Global Programs to better understand how sustainable farmers and ranchers are affected by and deal with drought. Members of the former Nebraska branch of Holistic Resource Management, Nebraska Sustainable Agricultural Society, and Nebraska Organic Crop Improvement Association were surveyed to see how they dealt with the years of drought. Hayes and Knutson presented their findings in North Platte and Chadron, Nebraska, in June 2006. PowerPoint presentations http://www.drought.unl.edu/mitigate/workshop_presentations.htm may be viewed or downloaded.

 

On-line Collection of Climographs for Selected Cities Grows

We’ve added more climographs for cities both in the U.S. and abroad. Climographs are a quick way to characterize normal precipitation and temperature for a location. Measurements are provided in both English and metric units.

 

Water Conservation for Homeowners

The NDMC provided some of the information for publications Make Every Drop Count in Your Home and Make Every Drop Count on Your Yard, from the University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension that outline some of the ways homeowners can conserve water.

 

WMO Brochure

Dr. Donald A. Wilhite prepared a publication for the World Meteorological Organization, http://www.wmo.ch/  “Drought Monitoring and Early Warning: Concepts, Progress and Future Challenges,” which is being released at a WMO meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, on desertification. It is available from the WMO as publication No. 1006. It is also available from NDMC. (3.7Mb)

 

Books:

• Australia’s National Drought Policy: From Disaster Response to Risk Management, edited by L. Courtenay Botterill and D.A. Wilhite, is now available from Kluwer Academic Press. See the Table of Contents here.
• Drought and Water Crises: Science, Technology, and Management Issues, edited by D.A. Wilhite, was published by CRC Press in March 2005. See the Table of Contents here.

 

Staff Notes

The National Drought Mitigation Center’s staff is growing to keep up with its research commitments, particularly a set of projects undertaken for the US Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency. (See news release from last fall.)

We congratulate Dr. Michael J. Hayes, Climate Impacts Specialist, on being named NDMC Associate Director. Mike has been with the NDMC since its inception in 1995. Mike is involved in most of the National Drought Mitigation Center’s efforts and his coworkers greatly appreciate his consistently even-tempered, good-humored, detail-oriented leadership.

Others who have joined the NDMC in 2006 include:

Dr. Ya Ding, Agricultural Economist. She is working on a methodology to quantify the economic impacts of drought, and constructing decision-support tools for decision makers -- including agricultural producers, natural resources managers, and policy makers -- to reduce the risk associated with drought. Ya got her PhD from the Department of Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University in May 2005. Her major research interests include natural resource and environmental economics, and related agricultural policy analysis.

Denise Gutzmer, Impacts Analyst. Denise recently completed a master’s degree from UNL’s School of Natural Resources with a specialization in climate assessment and impacts. Denise is working with the NDMC temporarily while she seeks other employment.

Bryan Leavitt, Remote Sensing. Bryan splits his time and expertise between the NDMC and CALMIT’s field program. His areas of specialization are remote sensing under non-optimal conditions, interfacing remote sensing equipment with computers, and data acquisition and processing.

Mark Mesarch, Web Designer and Programmer. Mark joined the NDMC staff in the Spring of 2006. He currently is the webmaster for the Nebraska Forest Service, the Climate and Bio-Atmospheric Sciences Program (CBAS)of the School of Natural Resources at UNL and the National Modena Club. He specializes in database connections to websites, database management and structure. Mark also is the site supervisor for the National Atmostpheric Deposition Program (NRSP-3) for Eastern Nebraska and the field manager for the Remote Sensing group of CBAS.

Dr. Jae Ryu, P.E., Hydrologist/Climate Management Specialist. Jae, a hydrological modeler and forecaster, is working on the development of computer-based decision-support systems for drought management, including a U.S. Drought Atlas. These systems include hydrologic modeling, the incorporation of climate forecast information, GIS technology, and the development of web-based user interfaces. Jae also helps write grant proposals and supervise graduate and undergraduate students.

Soren Scott, GIS Specialist. Soren is making invaluable contributions to the development of various web-based drought-mapping tools. Before this, she spent four years at the University of Arizona, working extensively on a joint project (AGWA: the Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment tool) between the University, the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and the US EPA, creating a GIS-based watershed modeling application.

Meghan Sittler, Research/Outreach Specialist. In addition to much relevant work experience, Meghan has lifelong ties with her family’s farm in southeast Nebraska and is immersed in issues related to collaborative management of the Missouri River. She’d like to increase our collective understanding of critical natural resource and societal issues by developing successful communication and collaboration with the public, scientists, and policy makers.

Kelly Helm Smith, Science Communicator. Kelly returns to the NDMC after a six-year absence with a fresh master’s degree in Community & Regional Planning, and experience as a community organizer, helping faith-based and non-profit organizations work with Lincoln’s growing Sudanese population. Kelly is particularly interested in fostering communication between scientists and people who can benefit from their research.

Kristin Thornblad, Law Student and Impacts Analyst. Kristin is a law student, renowned at the NDMC for her speed and accuracy in assessing and recording media descriptions of drought’s impacts.

Dr. Brian Wardlow, Remote Sensing Specialist.  Brian joined the NDMC in March after completing his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kansas.  He brings extensive remote sensing experience to the NDMC, particularly in the areas of land cover characterization and environmental monitoring.  Prior to joining the NDMC, he worked as a NASA Earth System Science Graduate Fellow at the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing program and as a remote sensing scientist at the USGS Center for Earth Resources Observation Science (EROS).  Brian is originally from Nebraska and is a native of Falls City.

We congratulate Melissa Higgins, former NDMC research/outreach specialist, on her new position on the Education staff with the University of Arizona’s SAHRA (Sustainability of semi-Arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas) group.

For more information, please refer to staff profiles.