Building Drought Resilience in the Mid-Atlantic: Strategic Planning Meeting for New Mid-Atlantic Drought Early Warning System

Building Drought Resilience in the Mid-Atlantic: Strategic Planning Meeting for New Mid-Atlantic Drought Early Warning System

From the unpredictability of flash droughts to dry conditions that threatened water supplies in major cities last year, the Mid-Atlantic faces complex challenges. To confront these growing risks, more than 50 federal, state, academic, and regional stakeholders convened to begin shaping the Mid-Atlantic Drought Early Warning System (DEWS).

On April 9, 2026, NIDIS, along with the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC), brought together partners in the Mid-Atlantic to identify unique drought-related issues in the Mid-Atlantic region and strengthen drought preparedness and resilience. The Mid-Atlantic DEWS strategic planning meeting helped define a strategic vision and steps to enhance regional coordination across the region, with a goal of producing a 5-year strategic plan to guide regional DEWS implementation by the end of the year.  

Drought-related challenges in the Mid-Atlantic DEWS focused on the region’s complex geography, significant water supply vulnerabilities in urban centers, and the technical difficulties of communicating drought triggers and impacts to diverse end-users. These included:

• Hydrogeological challenges, such as diverse geology across Appalachian regions, soil and groundwater variability, coastal ecosystem impacts from saltwater intrusion, and rapid swings between excessive dryness and extreme wet conditions, including flash drought events that can complicate drought assessment and catch stakeholders off-guard.
• Operational challenges, including critical water infrastructure risks in major urban centers in the region, difficulty managing recovery triggers for when the region comes out of a drought event, and monitoring gaps that are insufficient for real-time decision-making.
• Communications and sector-based challenges, ranging from insufficient information access in rural communities to needs for sector-specific drought information in the agriculture, defense, and public health  sectors.

Tools to Enhance Mid-Atlantic Drought Early Warning 

The meeting highlighted several specific tools and resources to enhance drought early warning capacity and regional resilience.

In partnership, NRCC and NIDIS developed Northeast DEWS Dashboard, displays up-to-date drought maps and tools for the Northeast.Users can zoom in to a specific state  across all maps or view conditions for the entire Northeast region. The Mid-Atlantic DEWS plans to expand the dashboard to include the Mid-Atlantic region.

USGS’s River DroughtCast is an interactive online tool that delivers current streamflow drought conditions and weekly forecasts of streamflow drought at approximately 3,000 USGS streamgages with more than 40 years of data across the lower 48 states. Users can view current observed or forecast conditions up to 13 weeks in advance using an interactive map.

USGS Flow Photo Explorer is an integrated database, machine learning, and data visualization platform to monitor streamflow and other hydrologic conditions using timelapse images. The tool seeks to develop new approaches to collect hydrologic data in streams, lakes, and other waterbodies, especially in places where traditional monitoring methods and technologies are not feasible or are cost-prohibitive.

National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC)’s suite of drought monitoring tools includes the U.S. Drought Monitor, NDMC Objective Blends, Condition Monitoring Observer Reports (CMOR), and Drought Impact Reporter (DIR). It also includes data products like the Forest Drought Response Index (ForDRI), which monitors forest drought conditions and provides a weekly overview of the drought impacts on forests across the continental U.S.

Insights from the Northeast DEWS served as a foundational example for the Mid-Atlantic DEWS strategic planning process, specifically in exchanging lessons learned from recent drought events. Northeast DEWS partners from Connecticut detailed how the 2024 flash drought in the state—driven by its driest two months on record—revealed the need for improved rapid response capabilities. Connecticut,  working in partnership with the NRCC and NIDIS, is currently developing a 2024 Flash Drought Case Study to identify state-specific impacts, how actions differed due to the rapid onset, and lessons learned, which will ultimately inform updates to the Connecticut Drought Plan. For Mid-Atlantic partners, Connecticut’s example illustrated how a regional DEWS can respond to specific regional conditions, sector impacts, and decision-support needs that emerge during flash drought events that are common in the eastern United States.

Prioritizing Action to Reduce Drought Risk

During the afternoon, meeting attendees participated in breakout sessions to gather individual consultation on potential Mid-Atlantic DEWS priorities for the first few years of implementation. Across breakout groups, participants widely shared a commitment to moving the region from reactive drought risk management to proactive coordination and planning by leveraging existing programs and partnerships. More specific discussion followed around the following themes:

Communication and Outreach

• Develop regional communications products and centralized messaging to ensure consistency in how drought information is disseminated to the public and stakeholders
• Targeted outreach to rural communities and the agricultural sector through trusted partners 
• Resources to educate decision-makers and the public about drought basics and regional vulnerabilities to drought events
• An accessible, easy-to-understand website and regional drought information dashboard  to describe current conditions, outlooks, impacts, and relevant research for the region

Coordination and Planning

• Regular regional coordination meetings to exchange knowledge and share project updates and research, along with tools cafés and product development opportunities to make new drought decision support products more accessible and applicable to regional needs
• Drought scenario exercises, leveraging generative AI, to test emergency plans for drought events and familiarize stakeholders, including water utilities, with available tools
• Inventory of systems and resources, including state and local drought plans, existing regional monitoring networks and coordination mechanisms, and a system to share relevant drought activities to foster a community of practice 

Monitoring and Research

• Improved real-time monitoring to better integrate groundwater data into drought assessment and better understand groundwater-surface water interactions
• Explore new metrics, including research to define more effective metrics, to monitor flash drought, hot drought, and winter drought, particularly as they relate to specific sectors such as tourism and estuary management
• Leverage existing state, local, and regional tools, such as the West Virginia Public Water System Drought Risk dashboard, for use across the Mid-Atlantic

Learning, Leading and Improving The Mid-Atlantic DEWS 

The Mid-Atlantic DEWS Strategic Plan will be released later this year, capturing many of the priorities and themes noted from this meeting. In the first 1-2 years, the Mid-Atlantic DEWS will provide a forum for federal, tribal, state, and local water and land resource management decision makers to develop appropriate, relevant, useful, and accessible drought, weather, and water-related information. In 2026, the team is scoping the DEWS and identifying strategic priorities for: (1) monitoring and forecasting; (2) impact indicators and triggers; and (3) preparedness and applied research. The Mid-Atlantic DEWS will identify existing partnerships, decision support tools, and actions needed to improve information delivery and coordination for drought risk reduction. With the strategic plan completed later this year, the Mid-Atlantic DEWS will lay the groundwork for future collaborative drought science.

Looking ahead, the Mid-Atlantic DEWS will focus on developing decision-support products that provide region- and sector-specific drought information, integrating drought data into Mid-Atlantic planning and preparedness, and establishing a network of ongoing briefings with regional partners on impacts, current conditions, and forecasts across timescales. The region will leverage the network of regional DEWS around the country to advance applied drought research in the Mid-Atlantic and evaluate the process to learn from it in an iterative cycle.

The April 9 strategic planning meeting was made possible by the participation and longstanding partnership of many federal, state, and local agencies, tribal partners, state climatologists, watershed organizations, water utilities, and others who are at the forefront of building drought early warning and resilience capabilities in the region. This collaborative effort to strategically plan for a regional DEWS is a vital step toward establishing a proactive, regionally-tailored, and resilient approach to drought risk management across the Mid-Atlantic.