Drought Research and Outreach at CIG Andy Wood Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Land Surface Hydrology Research Group Phil Mote, Amy Snover Climate Impacts Group Center for Science in the Earth System 2007 RISA PIs Meeting San Diego, CA February 2007

Current drought research and activities CIG’s drought-relevant work falls into 3 main categories: Outreach activities – “meetings / collaboration” Information resources – “datasets” Monitoring and prediction methods – “tools”

Outreach Activities CIG: an established provider of information about climate variability and climate change regular fall meetings on implications of current and future climate for water, fish, forests, energy, … in times of drought, e.g., 2001, 2005, additional spring meetings facilitate interactions between: university researchers agencies the public media climate information user community assist state-level drought responses both fall outlook and spring drought meetings. started as seasonal/interannual focus, shifted to climate gradually.

Outreach Activities CIG’s Anne Steinemann is currently investigating drought impacts in collaboration with the State of Washington Focusing on four aspects of drought in Washington State Impacts, vulnerability, indicators, and responses Expert advisory panel WA Department of Community Trade and Economic Development WA Department of Ecology, Department of Agriculture WA Office of Financial Management Washington State University Interviewed representatives (over 60) from many sectors Agriculture, Municipal suppliers, Fisheries, Power, Recreation

Information Resources CIG has produced long term, gridded 1/8 degree climate & hydrology datasets for the PNW mined by UW and other researchers to improve understanding of climate and hydrologic extremes e.g., trend work of Hamlet, Mote and others data staged online for user access and analysis Note: state climatology role of CIG principal (Mote) helps in connecting CIG datasets to public

Monitoring and Prediction Methods At UW, CIG is linking to drought-relevant research supported by non-RISA NOAA programs: UW Land Surface Hydrology Research Group West-wide flow forecast system (CDEP, CPPA) Surface Water Monitor (TRACS, hopefully!) Hydrologic Prediction System for WA State (SARP) Drought characterization work (Andreadis et al., 2005), drought trends analysis (Andreadis & Letten., 2006) Central question: How will models (land surface / climate / coupled) become integrated into drought management? “nowcasting”, forecasting? retrospective diagnosis? attribution / detection?

UW Real-time Daily Nowcast SM, SWE (RO) ½ degree VIC implementation Mostly free running since May 2005 “Browsable” Archive, 1915-present No forecasting just yet… Another area of current research relates to the surface water monitor developed last year by A. Wood. This system, applied at coarse (1/2 degree) resolution over the entire CONUS, is completely automated (free-running) and updates every day. It’s just a prototype, demo project that have been unable to get funding to extend, and the main products are maps of current soil moisture & SWE, and an monthly archive that extends back to 1915, that also has SM & SWE maps. Anyway, we are now adapting the daily update approach for use in the westwide forecast system, and should have the first basin (PNW) land surface conditions updating daily (at 1/8 degree) within the month. After that we’ll move on to other basins, and probably extend the 1/8 nowcast eastward to the Mississippi R.

Surface Water Monitor archive (1915-current) June 1934 Aug 1993

Monitoring and Prediction Methods drought onset / recovery prediction?

Monitoring and Prediction Methods WA State soil moisture SWE

Future drought research and activities Outreach continue annual water-focused outlook meetings stakeholder workshop on observations and watershed monitoring expanded drought impacts assessment: Interviewing drought coordinators from western states improving Washington State drought preparedness Datasets creating finer resolution (1/16th degree) long-term hydrologic assessment datasets for PNW (in concert with WA state) with WA state, evaluating temperature sensitivity of river basins Tools working with WWA/CPC to add medium-range prediction to regional hydrologic assessment tools, western WA pilot case hosting workshop at CPASW with K. Jacobs focusing on decadal prediction – “state of science”