National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)

The 2014 Farm Bill permanently authorized the USDA Livestock Forage Program (LFP), which provides compensation to livestock producers who suffer grazing losses caused by drought and wildfires. The LFP bases payment eligibility on drought status categories of the U.S. Drought Monitor. Yet, there is evidence that Drought Monitor categories do not accurately capture the timescales of climate variability driving forage production and drought impacts across Arizona and New Mexico. Therefore, the current system may understate the extent of losses and need for compensation of Southwest ranchers. This study evaluates how the current application of the Drought Monitor in the LFP addresses drought and wildfire risks faced by Arizona and New Mexico ranchers and will seek out drought monitoring best practices specifically for rangeland systems. This project connects with several others in the Southwest aimed to improve the efficiency and efficacy of drought monitoring across the region. These projects support drought early warning as conceived by NIDIS and will help identify best practices in employing more relevant, timely, and unique drought monitoring strategies needed for AZ and NM.

Ongoing work includes:

• Engaging rural communities and ranchers in volunteer precipitation monitoring to improve the characterization of drought conditions in rural areas and to help inform the U.S. Drought Monitor (led by the USDA Southwest Climate Hub).
• Assessing the impact of drought on agricultural production and ranching in Arizona and developing an economic impact analysis of the Livestock Forage Program for Arizona (led by CLIMAS PI G. Frisvold, with A. Kerna Bickel and D. Duval).
• Understanding the impact of drought on the Rio Grande watershed in New Mexico (led by CLIMAS researcher C. Greene)

Drought risks and vulnerability varies within regional stakeholder networks. This project aimed to better characterize the complexity of drought vulnerability in the Lower San Pedro watershed. CLIMAS investigators engaged with a mix of stakeholders with shared interest in better understanding how drought and climate vulnerability might shape future climate risks. The project takes a local-to-regional perspective on drought and climate vulnerability and asks how that could inform a drought early warning system.

The 2018 New Mexico Drought Plan calls for more in-depth assessments of NM drought vulnerabilities. This project contributes to this need by identifying stakeholder concerns and drought research priorities along the Rio Grande Basin. This assessment engages areas of concern identified by the NM Drought Task Force, including water, economy, fire, recreation, health, agriculture, and the environment. This project aims to expand CLIMAS network of collaborators and stakeholders in New Mexico and identify emergent drought research priorities that feed into subsequent years of CLIMAS/NIDIS project work.

The Rio Grande|Bravo Climate Impacts & Outlook is a monthly product that provides timely climate, weather, and impacts information to stakeholders, researchers, and other interested parties in the Rio Grande/Bravo Basin region of New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. Each edition recaps conditions over the previous months, including notable events, and then shows forecasts for the next three months for temperature, precipitation, and fire conditions.

The Outlook is a product of the North American Climate Services Partnership (NACSP)—an innovative trilateral partnership between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. This partnership was established to respond to an increasing demand for accessible and timely scientific data and information in order to make informed decisions and build resilience in our communities. CLIMAS is an active participant in the NACSP Rio Grande-Rio Bravo Regional Pilot Area. CLIMAS co-produces the Rio Grande|Bravo Climate Impacts & Outlook with NACSP partners, and is one of several partners hosting the Outlook.

Drought is a complex phenomenon that can vary widely over space to due to precipitation patterns and in time due to lagging impacts in slowly varying systems. These factors are magnified in the semiarid Southwest U.S., where extreme interannual climate variability, topography, and highly localized precipitation patterns (e.g., monsoon season thunderstorms) create highly varying hydroclimatic patterns in both space and time and subsequent drought impacts. Current climate monitoring networks across Arizona and New Mexico struggle to capture this variability and accurately portray potential drought conditions.

Complementary datasets, like remote sensing greenness, used in conjunction with existing climate data, offer the potential to monitor drought conditions across large landscapes with sparse monitoring networks. Several efforts, including online geovisualization tools to access raw normalized-difference vegetation index (NDVI or greenness) data and more formalized remote sensing-based drought monitoring tools like VegDRI, have been developed over the past decade. A new effort supported by a recent NOAA-SARP/NIDIS grant spurred the development of tool called DroughtView, which takes a slightly different approach in combining cutting-edge online geovisualization tools with derived remote sensing products targeted at detecting drought conditions. DroughtView builds on the success of its precursor, RangeView, which was developed with guidance from agriculturists and resource managers who need environmental monitoring data. The tools in DroughtView are used to monitor biweekly changes in land surface greenness conditions as a proxy for drought impacts at very fine spatial scales across the Southwest U.S. More information can be found at http://droughtview.arizona.edu

DroughtView combines geovisualization tools with remote sensing products to detect drought conditions. The DroughtView tool served as a key piece of information to help the National Resources Conservation Service, US Bureau of Land Management, and US Forest Service range managers determine drought conditions and Farm Services Agency drought disaster assistance eligibility. DroughtView is a web-based decision-support tool for computers and mobile devices that combines satellite-derived measures of surface greenness with additional geospatial data so that users can visualize and evaluate vegetation dynamics across space and over time.

The goal of this project is to work with the Hopi Tribe's Dept. of Natural Resources (HDNR) to develop a set of drought indicators and approaches for collecting, analyzing, and utilizing the data needed to support each indicator. In addition to indicators that rely on available temperature and precipitation data, we hope to develop a complementary suite of indicators that utilizes drought impacts information the HDNR has begun to collect. The integrated suite of indicators and processes to support monitoring them will: provide the foundation for revisions to the Hopi Tribe's current drought management and response plan; result in a new stream of locally-derived data and information that could provide input to national drought products like the U.S. Drought Monitor; and be the backbone of a system that would provide local, regional, and national decision makers better insight into developing drought conditions before an event reaches critical levels.

The Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation have been experiencing widespread and persistent drought conditions for more than a decade. Drought has impacted vegetation and local water resources in ways that threaten agricultural systems and ecosystems that are critical to supporting the Hopi and Navajo people.

Limited hydroclimatological and ecological monitoring across the region has made it difficult to assess current drought impacts and anticipate future impacts. By working with Navajo and Hopi resource managers to develop better drought monitoring tools and tactics, researchers will help these two communities reduce their vulnerability to drought, cope with unavoidable drought impacts, and plan for long-term sustainability in the region.

The second phase of this project is focused on working with the Hopi Department of Natural Resources to develop drought monitoring and planning processes that are useful for tribal decision making.

This project examined CLIMAS efforts to engage stakeholders on climate-related topics (with a particular emphasis on drought-related engagement) through a broad array of efforts between 2002 and 2007. The primary goals of the evaluation project were to determine: (a) penetration of CLIMAS information to stakeholders, (b) the perceived salience, credibility and legitimacy of CLIMAS research and outreach, and (c) changes in stakeholder attitudes, knowledge, and behavior as a result of partnerships and collaborative processes. The six-person evaluation team is comprised of both CLIMAS team members and experienced program evaluators with no CLIMAS contact prior to this effort. The team is using an evaluation approach that includes surveys, key informant interviews, and focus groups. The knowledge generated by this project will provide a broad array of insights into the successes and challenges of a long-term, stakeholder-driven climate research and outreach effort. This knowledge is important both for the future success of the CLIMAS program itself, but more generally it will offer guidance for other initiatives with similar operational models, like the National Integrated Drought Information System.