NIDIS Coping with Drought

Extreme weather impacts our transportation system in many ways. This project focuses on dust storms, particularly as they connect to drought. One goal is to increase the safety of drivers during these events along the Interstate 10 in southwestern New Mexico, where danger from dust storms often occurs. An early warning dust forecast system could minimize the number of vehicle accidents and associated fatalities on New Mexico highways. A neural network camera study indicated an accuracy of 97% and a precision of 94% for dust storm classification utilizing a combination of hue, saturation, and value bands. Researchers successfully acquired additional instrumentation to test a new early warning system that is different from roadway information systems often installed along highways. A Vaisala CL51 ceilometer was purchased by NMDOT in 2019 to sense dust plumes as they form over the dust source areas. The instrument is currently being tested in the laboratory and will be tested outside during Summer 2020 to determine locations where it will be most useful.

This research project was highlighted in the 2019 NOAA Science Report, page 40. https://nrc.noaa.gov/Portals/0/edited%20final%20report.pdf

This project aims to better understand the different climate and environmental threats facing urban and rural communities in Arizona and New Mexico. The project focuses on: 1) participating in the lower San Pedro River conservation collaborative to provide expertise about drought and climate vulnerability that is tailored to specific regional challenges; 2) expanding our analysis in the Gila River basin to identify potential collaborators and regional priorities regarding drought and climate; 3) collaborating with Pima County Office of Emergency Management to update their hazard mitigation plan. This project contributes to the Intermountain West Drought Early Warning System (IMW DEWS)

As Indigenous communities in the U.S. and around the world confront ongoing climate hazards and plan for future problems related to climate change such as threats to human health, a variety of challenges have arisen related to the data necessary to support decision-making. As Native nations seek to utilize the best available data and information to build climate resilience and healthy, sustainable communities, issues around data relevance, ownership, access, possession, and control arise. For example, a Native nation may collect their own data or have access to culturally sensitive traditional knowledge useful to inform climate-related decisions, but they may not wish to make that data widely available even though it may be helpful when seeking funding or engaging in regional climate adaptation planning.

A website about the Indigenous Data Sovereignty Summit in Arizona 2019 provides information about tribal interests and needs related to Indigenous data sovereignty use this site, which provides access to video and slide decks that were previously unavailable. https://nni.arizona.edu/programs-projects/policy-analysis-research/indi…

In response to prolonged drought conditions and declining storage capacity in Lake Mead, the Bureau of Reclamation called upon Colorado Basin States to develop new drought contingency plans to limit the draw-down of Lake Mead. Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan calls for significant reductions in surface water supplies delivered to irrigated agriculture in Pinal County. This project considers the effects of these reduced water supplies on: crop production in Pinal county; Arizona dairy production and non-agricultural sectors in the Pinal County economy; and recreational demand around Lakes Mead and Powell. These surface water reductions may reduce the sustainability of agricultural production in Central Arizona.

In partnership with The Nature Conservancy, CLIMAS researchers are assessing the impacts of precipitation variability and temperature changes on vegetation production and mortality and identifying optimal drought monitoring metrics. It focuses on the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area (NCA) to examine longer-term drought impacts in this multi-use Bureau of Land Management NCA. The assessment shows how seasonality and precipitation timing and frequency relate to monthly scale precipitation-based drought indices. The modeling approach was also used to assess the performance of temperature-based indices and further explore the role of increasing temperatures in driving drought stress across the region. CLIMAS researchers have also been working with the Las Cienegas Watershed group as well and may be able to recommend specific drought indices for their ongoing State of the Watershed monitoring.

This project documents the historical and current drought status of rangeland areas used for cattle ranching across Southwestern New Mexico and Northwestern Chihuahua. Interviews will be conducted with ranchers in the US and Mexico facing these challenges. Interviews will be recorded, translated into English, edited, and included in a short video documentary. A report will accompany the video with data on the drought on both sides of the border and summaries of the interviews.

Importance: This project lays the groundwork for an assessment of drought impacts and needs for cattle ranchers in the Lower Rio Grande.

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.

University of Arizona Cooperative Extension and the National Weather Service (NWS) in Tucson have developed a working group focused on engaging the agricultural community of Southeast Arizona. The working group is assessing information needs, providing training opportunities and technical support, as well as conducting applied research and developing new and enhanced decision support tools. Main activities have included several training and needs assessment workshops, the development and maintenance of a listserv with more than 40 subscribers, and the development of new NWS forecast information visualizations and interfaces focused on frost and freezing events.

Climate extremes pose serious threats to human health and place increasing demands on municipal services and infrastructure, and they threaten the long-term sustainability of a region. These extremes have implications for rapid response and emergency management, but they also amplify the effects of underlying social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities and have numerous potential long-term consequences in terms of planning for and dealing with potential disasters. In the Southwest, heat presents a unique opportunity to study the intersection between an acute event (e.g., a multi-day heat wave), and underlying vulnerabilities and risks. It also presents an opportunity to look for cross-sector impacts and potential cascades of impacts.