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The National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is excited to co-chair several town halls and oral/poster sessions at the 103rd meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in January 2023. These sessions will cover topics such as megadroughts in the western U.S., soil moisture data, drought analysis and prediction, service delivery lessons, and translating climate science into action. 

These ten maps provide an overview of water storage in the West and a winter snow drought outlook for Water Year 2023. The maps  show how previous La Niña winters have impacted precipitation and temperature across the U.S., the latest National Weather Service outlooks that are influenced by these past La Niña events, and water supply issues in the West, and snow drought conditions.

According to recent research led by Benjamin Cook (NASA Goddard) and a team of international scientists, climate change is likely to increase future megadrought risk through regional declines in precipitation and widespread increases in evaporative demand. The impacts of an ongoing megadrought in Southwestern North America (2000–present), amplified by climate change, suggest that these events will significantly strain water resources and present major resiliency challenges in the future.

NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) has announced a total annual award of more than $6.2 million to support 12 new, innovative, and impactful projects that will improve our nation’s resilience at a critical time in the fight against the drought crisis. The projects will focus on ecological drought and building tribal drought resilience.

Through the Fall 2022 NASA DEVELOP team, early-career scientists aim to understand how soil moisture and fire fuel behavior preceding wildfires can inform future fire and drought monitoring.

In two recent studies, UCLA’s Land Surface Hydrology Group examined western U.S. streamflow declines in response to climate warming and found they are expected to be asymmetric depending on the season in which most warming occurs.

In a new NIDIS-funded study, authors Richard Seager, Mingfang Ting, Patrick Alexander, Jennifer Nakamura, Haibo Liu, Cuihua Li, and Isla R. Simpson use reanalyses and sea surface temperature-forced climate models to examine what large-scale atmosphere-ocean conditions were responsible for the onset and intensification of this latest widespread and severe drought in southwestern North America. 

In response to these needs expressed by tribal partners, NOAA's National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is pleased to announce a new map customization feature for Tribal Nations. Developed in collaboration with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), this feature allows users to display reservation boundaries on any map on Drought.gov. 

Climate change is impacting water supplies for communities and ecosystems around the world. In a new study funded in part by NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), researchers from the Montana Climate Office evaluated the degree to which assumptions of a climate stationarity may bias drought assessment. The study reveals that drought assessment error is relatively low with short climatology lengths, and error (with respect to the more recent climate) can increase substantially when using longer reference frames where climate is changing rapidly. 

Timely information on drought impacts is important for developing and evaluating drought indicators, documenting drought events, reducing future risks, and enhancing public awareness. To address needs for better understanding and monitoring of localized drought impacts, this study recruited volunteers from the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network to report on how weather and recent precipitation affected their local environments and communities. The study found that the reporting of conditions across a wet-to-dry scale by the CoCoRaHS volunteers reflect meteorological conditions, and provide on-the-ground details that are being incorporated into existing drought monitoring processes.