What’s New

October 2006

Breaking News

National Integrated Drought Information System Advances in Congress

The nation’s community of drought researchers and policy advisors in September focused on realizing the vision of a National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), including shepherding legislation through Congress. The bill is now waiting for consideration by the full Senate.

The NIDIS Act of 2006 would enhance the nation’s drought early warning system, including a web-based information clearinghouse; provide drought monitoring, including the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor; and develop drought policy and planning techniques. The text of the legislation specifies that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would probably house NIDIS, working in collaboration with partners such as the National Drought Mitigation Center. The Senate version of the bill authorizes funding of $8 million to $11 million annually through fiscal year 2012. The House version authorizes a total of $81 million for NIDIS for 2007 through 2012.

On Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2006, the House of Representatives voiced its approval of H.R. 5136, sponsored by Rep. Ralph Hall of Texas. It had passed the Science Committee on June 6. On Wednesday, Sept. 27, the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved S. 2751, sponsored by Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Witnesses endorsing the bills as they passed through key committees included Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, Director of the National Drought Mitigation Center. The Western Governors’ Association is providing crucial support in moving the legislation through the process.

For more information, please refer to press releases from the House Committee on Science , from the Senate Commerce Committee, and from the Western Governors’ Association.

The Congressional action was preceded by a two-day meeting of drought researchers, policy makers and educators in Longmont, Colorado. Participants identified next steps in all areas, including possible pilot programs such as Drought-Ready Communities. For more information, please refer to the meeting web site and the presentations.

U.S. Drought Monitor Zooms In to State Level

An enhanced version of the U.S. Drought Monitor went live in September with state-level breakdowns that include county lines, making it easier to use but increasing the pressure to deliver information that is spatially fine-tuned.

The weekly product (drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html) now includes breakdowns by region and by state, available as both html and pdf documents, along with summary statistics on changes in drought status affecting various areas, announced Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center who is one of the lead authors and developers of the U.S. Drought Monitor.

“We’ve been talking about these changes with our partners at NOAA and USDA since we first launched the U.S. Drought Monitor back in 1999,” Svoboda said. In a statement to fellow authors and reviewers, he said, “I tip my cap to our GIS programmer Soren Scott here at the NDMC for helping make these features happen so quickly after coming aboard the center here.” Scott joined the NDMC earlier this year. The NDMC’s expanded capabilities are largely due to funding from the USDA’s Risk Management Agency.

The U.S. Drought Monitor, first launched in 1999, is a synthesis of multiple climate monitoring tools as well as the informed judgments of its authors and 225-plus federal, state and academic reviewers across the country. The Drought Monitor provides a big-picture view of current drought conditions in the United States.

The enhancements first released in a beta version in July 2006 are part of the first phase of turning the U.S. Drought Monitor into a more robust, interactive Decision Support System, Svoboda said.

Coincidentally, the enhancements came out at nearly the same time as an announcement by U.S. Department of Agriculture officials that tied emergency assistance for ranchers to counties identified as being in D3, extreme drought, or D4, exceptional drought, during the growing season.

The federal announcement touched off a flurry of debate among U.S. Drought Monitor authors and reviewers as to whether it is sufficiently accurate to allocate assistance at the local level. It illustrated the characteristic tension between scientists, who prefer very precise, highly qualified information, and policy makers, who need the best possible information and generally recognize that some uncertainty is inevitable.

“I think it’s great that USDA is using the Drought Monitor to make decisions. It simply is the best thing out there,” said Mark Shafer, Director of Climate Information for the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. Shafer said that without the Drought Monitor, decisions such as emergency assistance were largely made without much objective information, essentially in a vacuum.

Shafer and others also highlighted the need to combine the Drought Monitor’s big-picture view with locally generated information – for example, by tapping into USDA county-level reports. “In making county-level designations from a national product, there are bound to be some areas that are imperfectly attributed,” he said.

Brian Wolford, Executive Director of the Nebraska State Farm Service Agency, said the Drought Monitor is a good indicator of where to look for drought impacts, although it’s often fruitful to include counties next to those that are officially in D3 or D4 drought.

“Whenever you draw a line, there’s going to be people on one side that may not be in agreement with where it is,” he said. Wolford emphasized that the U.S. Drought Monitor brings an additional focus to the FSA’s standard data collection methods, quantifying crop yields and losses on a county-by-county basis.

Wolford observed that in the past five years, “The USDA has begun using the Drought Monitor more in program administration.” In addition to the newly announced Livestock Assistance Grant Program, the USDA has used the Drought Monitor to determine eligibility for emergency haying and grazing of Conservation Reserve Program land and to qualify producers in designated counties for the Cattle Feed Program and the Livestock Compensation Program.

                “We’re trying to provide better tools to help producers make their case when these kinds of issues come up,” Svoboda said. However, he cautioned, farmers and ranchers should assume that they bear the burden of proof in making the case that their specific circumstances warrant assistance.

Recognizing the need for impacts information to complement the data on physical systems, the National Drought Mitigation Center is also working to create a more robust Drought Impact Reporter (droughtreporter.unl.edu). The first version went live in July 2005, relying mainly on collected media reports and other submitted impacts.

Mike Hayes, Associate Director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, said, “In our workshops and interactions with producers, we tell them that one of the best mitigation strategies a producer can take -- in other words, an action taken before a drought occurs -- is great record keeping. That might include historical yield data, planting data, climate data, and pictures. … If a producer has documentation, and then can get supplemental information from their Regional Climate Centers, State Climatologists, local county extension agents, and local National Weather Service offices, they are going to be well-prepared to offer an argument for an exception.”

Kelly Redmond, Deputy Director of the Western Regional Climate Center, observed that it is nearly impossible to control how information is used once it is released. “My take is more that the users are giving us a big hint about how they'd like the information to be used,” he said. “If we can't make the use appropriate to the product, let's use that as a motivator to make the product appropriate to the use.”

 
NDMC Launches Daily Gridded SPI

The National Drought Mitigation Center and the High Plains Regional Climate Center announced the launch in late September of the Daily Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index, which makes drought data immediately available at a sub-county level. Previously the data was available by climate divisions, which typically include several counties.

“This is all part of a broader effort to enhance existing tools and develop new tools to help decision-makers at all levels, including agricultural producers,” said Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, Director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, and a professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a drought index based only on precipitation that was developed in 1993. The SPI can be used to monitor conditions on a variety of time scales. This temporal flexibility allows the SPI to be useful in both short-term agricultural and long-term hydrological applications.

The “daily gridded” version of the SPI will help U.S. Drought Monitor authors fine-tune accuracy at scales smaller than counties and climate divisions. It aggregates and interpolates climate data into a grid that breaks the U.S. down into generally uniform 40-square-kilometer areas. The sub-state lines on the map are county lines, which allow users to orient themselves to familiar geopolitical boundaries. Automated systems update data and maps daily.

For more information, please refer to the NDMC’s overview of drought indices, which contains an in-depth look at the SPI.

 
Drought Conference Forges Science-Policy Link

A “Roadmap for Change” on drought policy will come out of a three-day science and policy conference that was Sept. 18-20 in Longmont, Colorado. Helping forge a stronger science-policy link was Dr. Gene Whitney, from the Office of Science & Technology Policy at the White House.

Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, worked with the Geological Society of America and others to organize Managing Drought & Water Scarcity: Roadmap for Change in the U.S. The organizers were pleased that Dr. Whitney was able to devote the better part of four days to the GSA conference and the following implementation meeting on the National Integrated Drought Information System. Dr. Whitney was formerly with the U.S. Geological Survey.

His presentation on how to communicate with policy makers was well received. He recommended a binary approach to information, even at the risk of over-simplifying. For example, he said, his bird-identifying success was greatly boosted when he began classifying birds as “owls” and “non-owls.” Dr. Whitney also presented practical, detailed tips on communicating with policy-makers.

For more information, please visit the conference website Proceedings will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the conference generated media interest and raised the profile of the drought issue. See, for example:

 
NDMC Footage Set to Air Oct. 8 on The Weather Channel

Tune in to The Weather Channel on Sunday, October 8, 2006, to see NDMC staff on The Climate Code: The Problem Is Global, the Solution is Possible, a new weekly series hosted by Heidi Cullen. Other groups within Nebraska’s School of Natural Resources will also be featured on other episodes.

Ms. Cullen was in Nebraska with a TWC film crew in early August, along with an HBO film crew. HBO is working on a documentary about climate change. A related TWC Internet production, One Degree: Climate Change -- http://climate.weather.com/ -- also includes footage from the Nebraska visit.

(Thanks to Ken Dewey of the High Plains Regional Climate Center for submitting this information.)

Calendar: Presentations & Conferences

October 12, 2006, North Platte, Nebraska. Dr. Cody Knutson of the NDMC will present Lessons Learned from the 2000-2005 Drought: What Ranchers Said in Recent Surveys to the Nebraska Section of the Society for Range Management.

October 12, 2006, North Platte, Nebraska. Dr. Michael Hayes of the NDMC will present Nebraska Drought History, Update, and Forecast to the Nebraska Section of the Society for Range Management.

October 13, 2006, North Platte, Nebraska. Dr. Cody Knutson of the NDMC will present Drought Effects on Wildlife in Nebraska to the Nebraska Chapter of the Wildlife Society.

October 16, 2006, Brookings, SD. Dr. Brian Wardlow of the NDMC will present 'Evaluation of MODIS 250-Meter Vegetation Index Data for Regional-Scale Crop Mapping: Results from the State of Kansas' in a graduate seminar at the Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence at South Dakota State University.

October 16-20, 2006, Mexico City, Mexico. Mark Svoboda and Brian Fuchs will represent the National Drought Mitigation Center at the North American Drought Monitor Forum, presenting information on the NDMC’s newest tools and projects.

October 23-24, 2006, Lincoln, Nebraska. The National Drought Mitigation Center will host Ned Guttman of the National Climatic Data Center for collaborative work on the Drought Atlas, a decision-support tool that is in development.

October 25-27, 2006, New Delhi, India. Dr. Donald A. Wilhite, director of the NDMC, will participate in the World Meteorological Organization conference, “International Workshop On Agrometeorological Risk Management: Challenges and Opportunities.”

October 27, 2006, Lincoln, Nebraska. The National Drought Mitigation Center will participate in the 2006 UNL Water Colloquium with three separate posters, one on our Czech Republic drought monitoring collaboration; one on the Drought Impact Reporter; and one on seven different products that we are developing with sponsorship from the Risk Management Agency.

October 29, 2006, Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Michael Hayes of the NDMC will make a presentation as part of a session titled Human Impact on Climate: What We Did and What We Can Change at the Annual Conference for the Association of Science-Technology Centers.

November 1, 2006, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Dr. Cody Knutson will present New Decision-Support Tools for Climate and Vegetation Assessment: GreenLeaf and VegDRI, for the New Mexico Association of Conservation Districts.

October 31-November 4, 2006, Australia. Dr. Donald A. Wilhite will be consulting with the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne on drought monitoring issues.

November 29, 2006, Lincoln, Nebraska. Dr. Cody Knutson will present Lessons Learned from the 2000-2005 Drought: What Ranchers Said in Recent Surveys, to the Nebraska Cattlemen - Cattlemen’s College.

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