Southwest Drought Briefing: October 11, 2022

Welcome to the Southwest Drought Update

Speaker: Curtis Riganti | National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska – Lincoln

• Welcome to the October 2022 Southwest Drought Briefing. 
• Learn more about the Southwest Drought Learning Network.
• Acknowledgment of land.
• View past webinar recordings at drought.gov/webinars.
• Introduction of the speakers:
  • Jon Meyer, Assistant State Climatologist, Utah Climate Center, Utah State University
  • Simon Wang, Professor of Climate, Utah State University

Current Conditions and Drought Outlook

Speaker: Jon Meyer | Utah Assistant State Climatologist, Utah Climate Center, Utah State University

• Active and widespread monsoon rains have improved the regional short-term drought conditions.
• Status quo remains for the region’s long-term drought concerns (neither reduced nor exacerbated).
• Positives to start the 2023 Water Year:
  • Limited evaporative demand through fall transition.
  • Soil moisture is high leading to improved spring streamflow efficiency.
  • Winter agricultural drought pressures have relaxed in many areas of the Southwest.
• Negatives looking forward:
  • Third year of lowered expectations for winter season snowpack.
  • Snowpack outlook is unlikely to begin meaningful drought improvements to groundwater and reservoirs.

Feasibility of Adding Twitter Data to Aid Drought Depiction

Speaker: Simon Wang | Professor of Climate, Utah State University

• A sentiment analysis of Twitter data can lead to providing some indication of drought evolution in a region.
• In a case study in Colorado’s 2020-2021 drought, sentiment analysis with a machine learning model successfully predicted the change in drought conditions a few weeks in advance.
• Future work includes expanding this research to cover the western U.S.

Questions & Answers

Speaker: Joel Lisonbee | NOAA/National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)