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From worsening water quality to respiratory and mental health impacts, drought can have profound and widespread impacts on the health of communities across the nation. To better prepare health professionals for responding to the health effects of drought, a research team from the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health recently released a new guide, Drought and Health: A Messaging Framework for Public Health Professionals and Healthcare Providers. This guide aims to help healthcare providers and public health officials communicate about the health risks of drought with their patients and broader communities.

Ranchers face a persistent hurdle to making proactive management decisions due to a lack of timely and accurate drought-related information. The Hawai'i Rangeland Information Portal (H-RIP) was developed to help ranchers fill critical information needs. 

Last fall, NWS experimentally launched a modernized Drought Information Statement. After incorporating feedback during the testing period, NWS officially launched the new statements on April 1. NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) collaborated with NWS to support this important update, including creating customized regional graphics and an interactive map of all Drought Information Statements.

To better understand the potential impacts of distinct drought patterns on human health, a new NIDIS-funded study in the Science of the Total Environment examined the effects of monthly severe drought exposure on all-cause (deaths from any cause) and cardiovascular-related deaths in the Northern Rockies and Plains of the U.S. (including Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska) from 2000–2018. 

Created through a partnership between researchers at the Desert Research Institute, the University of California Merced, Google, NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), and other federal partners, Climate Engine allows users to create maps and time series plots for visualizing complex climate data. Now, the team is launching a new publicly accessible platform designed to produce easy to understand,  detailed reports for every Bureau of Land Management state office, district office, field office, and grazing allotment in the contiguous United States.

NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) recently launched an Instagram account. Instagram users can follow NIDIS at @NOAADrought to get the latest current news, conditions, and outlooks wherever they are. Follow us to stay up to date on drought in your region and beyond. 

The laws of thermodynamics dictate that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, but new NIDIS-supported research has found that atmospheric moisture has not increased as expected over arid and semi-arid regions of the world as the climate has warmed.

There are currently not many stations reporting publicly accessible soil moisture data in Alabama, leading to significant gaps in data coverage.  To fill that gap, a team led by Lee Ellenburg, a research engineer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s Earth System Science Center and Alabama associate state climatologist, developed a new type of low cost soil moisture monitoring station to deploy across the state. 

While numerous studies have shown how visitors adjust recreational decisions due to weather, two NIDIS-funded studies led by researchers at the University of California, Merced examined relationships between park visitation and drought indicators. They found park visitation patterns changed with indicated drought conditions, and the impact of drought differed among parks, likely due to the different park characteristics and activities available in parks.

Scientific data from ground observations, satellites, and climate models have not agreed on whether climate change is consistently chipping away at the snowpacks that accumulate in high-elevation mountains and provide water when they melt in spring. A new NIDIS-funded Dartmouth study cuts through the uncertainty in these observations and provides evidence that seasonal snowpacks throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere have indeed shrunk significantly over the past 40 years due to human-driven climate change.