Advancing Drought Early Warning through Interdisciplinary Research
Drought Early Warning Research
Research to better understand how droughts evolve and how their impacts are mitigated is critical to providing timely and reliable information, products, and services in support of drought early warning. In particular, research to improve drought monitoring and prediction capabilities on a variety of timescales and spatial scales are needed for water and emergency management decisions, as well as for water-dependent sectors of the economy to more efficiently manage their resources.
Advancing knowledge of the weather and climatic mechanisms that lead to drought onset, persistence, and recovery.
Strengthening drought prediction skill by identifying sources of drought predictability across timescales and regions to improve forecasts.
Incorporating the latest scientific advances into metrics for various societal sectors, and advanced information delivery platforms.
Improving coordination and delivery of information through in-person drought outlook forums and weekly webinars using networks of experts at the state and local level.
Featured Research Initiative
Analyzing Drought Indicator Relevance by Region and Season
Effectively monitoring and planning for drought involves tracking multiple indicators (such as precipitation, soil moisture, surface water supply, etc.). However, drought monitoring is complex, as the relevance of various indicators (like precipitation and soil moisture) changes based on location, season, and socioeconomic factors. To improve our understanding, a team of NASA scientists, funded by NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System, conducted research to quantify the "drought explainability" of 113 different drought indicators by location and season. The study used mutual information to compare these indicators to U.S. Drought Monitor designations from 2006–2019. These results were published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology.
To make the research findings more accessible and actionable, NIDIS developed an online resource that allows users to explore key takeaways of the study. This resource includes an overview of the drought indicators most representative of the U.S. Drought Monitor’s depiction of drought for a given region and season. Users can explore the data in a Story Map, or view the data in greater detail in an interactive table, which provides links to datasets used in the study and additional useful datasets to monitor drought.
NIDIS-Supported Competitive Research Programs
Since 2012, NIDIS has funded more than 80 grants through the competitive Coping with Drought Initiative and Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) program, in addition to supporting a variety of other research projects advancing drought early warning across sectors. Below are examples of NIDIS-supported competitive research initiatives and programs.
Coping with Drought Research Competition
NIDIS regularly hosts the Coping with Drought research competition, which supports research to assess the impacts of drought on agriculture, ecosystems, and water resources and develop decision support tools for regional, state, and local use.
Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP)
NIDIS supports drought-focused competitive funding opportunities through the NOAA Climate Program Office's Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) program, with a focus on understanding the predictability of droughts and the ability of models to capture those sources of predictability, advancing relevant modeling systems, improving prediction and monitoring capabilities, and transitioning research into operational or applied use. MAPP funds collaborative research projects that engage academia, interagency partners, and the private sector with NOAA, its operational centers, and research laboratories.
MAPP Drought Task Force
The goal of the interagency Drought Task Force is to achieve significant advances in understanding and in the ability to monitor and predict drought over North America. To help organize and maximize the output from MAPP drought research projects, the MAPP program, in partnership with NIDIS, organizes a Drought Task Force to coordinate the activities of researchers supported through each grant competition, and create an active community of practice around drought research and development in the United States. Learn more about previous Drought Task Forces: Drought Task Force I, Drought Task Force II, and Drought Task Force III.