Drought Research and Outreach at CIG

Andy WoodDepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Land Surface Hydrology Research Group

Phil Mote, Amy SnoverClimate Impacts Group

Center for Science in the Earth System

2007 RISA PIs MeetingSan Diego, CA

February 2007

CIG’s drought-relevant work falls into 3 main categories:

Outreach activities – “meetings / collaboration”

Information resources – “datasets”

Monitoring and prediction methods – “tools”

Current drought research and activities

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

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

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

CIG has produced long term, gridded 1/8 degree climate & hydrology datasets for the PNW

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?

½ degree VIC implementation

Mostly free running since May 2005

“Browsable” Archive, 1915-present

No forecasting just yet…

UW Real-time Daily NowcastSM, SWE

(RO)

Surface Water Monitor archive (1915-current)

June1934

Aug1993

Monitoring and Prediction Methods

drought onset / recovery prediction?

Monitoring and Prediction Methods

soil moisture

SWE

WAState

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”

Future drought research and activities