North Carolina Syncs Depictions to U.S. Drought Monitor

Curtis Weaver, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who is a regular on North Carolina’s weekly drought monitoring calls, sent the recommendation above to the U.S. Drought Monitor author following a recent call. Yellow areas indicating abnormally dry conditions were from the preceding week’s U.S. Drought Monitor, blue lines represented the author’s draft for the upcoming Monitor, and red lines showed the consensus recommendation from North Carolina.

North Carolina is unique in how its state water and resource managers provide input to the U.S. Drought Monitor. What began as an informal, volunteer effort to get agencies talking to one another is now written into law. A weekly teleconference by the Technical Drought Advisory Team, a subgroup of the state’s Drought Management Advisory Council, or DMAC, is a direct conduit to U.S. Drought Monitor authors, who join the calls as time permits.

The DMAC formed in 1992 after the state went through a serious drought in the late 1980s. When the next serious drought struck in 2002, the council “did a creditable job monitoring and coordinating drought responses,” according to its fact sheet. In 2003, the state legislature passed a law requiring that the DMAC produce official, objective drought status advisories to give local governments a reliable basis for their management decisions and an alternative to statewide declarations that did not consider local conditions. The same law also requires local governments and water suppliers to add drought response provisions to water supply plans. The DMAC considers stream flow rates, ground water levels, reservoir storage, forecasts, the time of year and impact information to produce its advisories. The DMAC’s drought advisories are linked to the North Carolina Emergency Operations Plan and the activation of the Drought Assessment and Response Plan.

The state has adopted the U.S. Drought Monitor’s depiction of North Carolina as its own characterization of drought. Although state law provides a process for the state’s Drought Monitoring Advisory Council to disagree with how the U.S. Drought Monitor depicts drought status, the provision has never been used. North Carolina distributes information from the North Carolina Drought Monitor to media and others through news releases and e-mail and through its website, www.ncdrought.org.

DM Authors: It’s a Reliable Synthesis

Among the data regularly reviewed is the percent of normal precipitation received in the past 30 days. This map is from the State Climate Office of North Carolina.

U.S. Drought Monitor authors said they appreciate the state’s recommendations and accept them with few, if any, modifications.

“North Carolina is the only state with an operational process in place that is structured both to allow the author input, by inviting him or her to join the conference call, and to provide the author with a unified suggestion, culled from input from a diverse collection of state experts and stakeholders. It’s on a set schedule each and every week that drought is affecting or threatens to affect the state,” said U.S. Drought Monitor author Rich Tinker, who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

“The biggest value is a consensus viewpoint or analysis of the state, coming from a single source with all the players involved,” said Brian Fuchs, a Drought Monitor author and climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC). “You know they’re doing the work. They have multiple people going over it and contributing. It’s not just ad hoc. As an author, I don’t really have to question a whole lot that comes out of that.”

Eric Luebehusen, a Drought Monitor author with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, agreed.
“Most importantly, the author does not get involved in local tug of wars over drought status designations, where parties from the same region disagree,” Luebehusen said.

And, as Fuchs said, “If you can eliminate some time analyzing a region because you know somebody is doing a good job of it, you can commit time to another region.”

Author Richard Heim, also at NOAA, said, “If other states followed the North Carolina process, time would prevent me from sitting in on their conference calls, but it would be a tremendous help. The biggest advantage is having state and local experts condense the indicators, data and impacts for the state down into a recommendation, or brief overview/summary of the indicators, data and impacts for us, so that we don’t have to wade through all of that information ourselves. It’s too much to look at in just three days.”

Other states are starting to experiment with similar processes. The state of Colorado has just this year initiated a similar weekly process, Fuchs said. Colorado provides information to the authors for individual river basins, incorporating parts of Utah and Wyoming.

Tinker pointed out circumstances that would prevent U.S. Drought Monitor authors from following state recommendations exactly: when state recommendations might violate the authors’ “unwritten rules,” such as not changing drought status by more than one category at the time except in extraordinary circumstances, and when state recommendations are not consistent with drought depictions in neighboring states.

Physical drought typically doesn’t follow state borders, although water management decisions, land use patterns and other anthropogenic factors may make one side of a border more vulnerable to the effects of drought than another.

North Carolina’s Choice of the U.S. Drought Monitor

The technical advisory group regularly reviews hydrological data, at times including water levels in wells in particularly significant locations. The U.S. Geological Survey generated this image.

In effect, North Carolina goes through its own version of the drought monitor process, and uses the consistent depiction of drought in the state for the national map and its own needs, such as putting local water systems on alert. If local systems don’t have their own drought response plans, provisions of the state’s plan apply by default when they are under severe or exceptional drought.

Tom Fransen, chief of the Hydrology and Management Section of the N.C. Division of Water Resources, recalled that “after the 2002 drought, I guess one of the things I was doing was trying to figure out what we needed to do better. I started playing around with a new drought index that we could use for water supply. Woody (Yonts, chairman of the N.C. Drought Management Advisory Council) saw what I was doing, so he made me the chair of a technical group. We came to the conclusion that rather than create something new, what we wanted to do was build on what, at that time, was still pretty young -- the Drought Monitor. Since the media had kind of picked up on that in the 2002 drought as a way to get the message out, we thought the better thing to do than create our own index was to give the national folks the best input we could on the national product.”

Yonts is a civil engineer with the state Division of Water Resources. In 1988, Yonts said he decided it was time to “settle down” and take a job with the state, where he soon became the point person on drought issues. Yonts had decades of drought-related experience, including laying pipe as a high school student on an emergency work crew to keep municipal water flowing, hydrological monitoring for the U.S. Geological Survey and working for Progress Energy, a power company that relied on hydroelectric and coal-generated power.

Yonts praised the evolution of the U.S. Drought Monitor toward finer spatial resolution, an issue he pushed for when he met drought monitor authors after the drought of 2002.

“I came up and talked about how we did business, and how we were going to be depending on the U.S. Drought Monitor, and how we were going to use that sucker as soon as it hit the street,” Yonts said. “I told them, ‘We need drought depicted by counties, not climate divisions,’ because regulatory authority flows from the state to county level, and a lot of emergency management is county-based. Finally, I guess they started getting a lot of pressure from around the country. Now we’re getting right down to the nitty gritty.”

In 2006, the Drought Monitor added county lines and separate state-level depictions of drought.
The U.S. Drought Monitor, which was established in 1999, is published every Thursday. It synthesizes data and drought impact information from a variety of sources to produce a single map depicting drought status across the United States. The rotating authors come from federal and academic institutions and work with a network of more than 270 reviewers nationwide. Some states are better represented than others. By necessity, the process simplifies complex information. Additional and supporting analyses of climate, soil moisture, hydrology and impacts are available on www.drought.gov, or at drought.unl.edu, and from many other state and federal agencies.

Time and Resource Commitment

A weekly report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the N.C. Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services for the week ending June 27, 2010, included this topsoil moisture chart, which was also reviewed on the drought monitoring call.

North Carolina’s weekly teleconferences typically take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the severity of drought, but some of the participants prepare data and organize information ahead of time, including current climatological, hydrological and impact-related depictions of conditions in the state.

Curtis Weaver, a hydrologist from the U.S. Geological Survey and a regular participant in the group, said “one of the things that I’ve been doing on a weekly basis is to put out an e-mail in advance of the call talking about the streamflow and groundwater conditions. If there’s a [Drought Monitor] draft that’s already out that’s been released, we’ll take that into account. If there’s not a draft available and there’s not any strong feeling one way or the other, then I may make some suggestions just to stir things up and get the group members thinking in advance of the call. It takes me a couple of hours.”

The state has invested in developing data infrastructure and mapping tools. Fransen said “one of my frustrations was that the USGS quantifies drought with different percentiles than what the drought authors do, and some of the (National) Weather Service uses different percentiles, so what I’ve tried to do is take these common data sets that we’re used to looking at and come up with tools where we can put things in the same percentiles, comparing apples to apples as much as possible.”

The mapping tools have been well-received and adopted by other organizations in the Southeast.

The calls regularly consider impacts on water resources, crop health, and forests, such as fire risk. Ryan Boyles, North Carolina state climatologist, emphasized, “It’s just dry weather until we have impacts. When we have impacts, then we have drought.”

The Keetch-Byram Drought Index is used to assess forest fire risk, and is one of the products the N.C. drought monitoring group regularly consults.

As drought intensifies, so does the number of participants and the amount of information flowing to the technical group. In fact, Fransen said, during severe drought, about six different weekly conference calls take place, all of which feed information into the state’s drought technical group call. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers holds weekly calls to monitor drought, flooding and other issues. Major power companies have provisions in their low-inflow protocols, required by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), that trigger weekly calls at a certain threshold.
“As the situation continues to get worse, that’s when the experts come into a real strong role as regards to forestry, agriculture folks, public water supply, water quality,” Yonts said. “We read the numbers and see what the impacts are for these various water users. We add it all together. Everybody has their part in the program in gathering our depiction.”

The state has developed an automated system to allow municipalities to report impacts.
“And of course we’ve got water quality folks that are on the line telling us about the condition of the resource, and typically when things are getting bad, we’ll have some of the wildlife folks on line, too,” Yonts said. “I’ll put it to you this way: If things get worse, we don’t seem to have any problems with people wanting to step forward telling us what kind of problems they’re seeing.”
Members of the technical group pointed to a “perfect storm” of circumstances that led to their focus on drought.

Boyles said, “you need two major droughts back-to-back and somebody like Woody twisting arms and talking people into joining the calls and keeping on top of them.”

Others agreed, and added that power companies going through FERC relicensing amid concerns about the reliability of municipal water supplies also raised awareness of water as a limited, renewable resource.

“For the most part this group has been fairly consistent,” Fransen said. “We’ve had a few people come and go, but there’s a pretty solid core that’s been doing this a number of years. We’ve gotten to know each other’s personalities and how to work together. I know our departmental secretary after one of Woody’s drought meetings said the thing that amazed him was you had such a diverse group, federal agencies, that came together that could reach consensus. He’d never seen that diverse of a group that was able to work as well as the group we put together here.”

Back to DroughtScape Summer 2010