NIDIS Coping with Drought

Dust storms in the Southwest U.S. and northern Mexico continue to be a serious health and safety issue. This project aims to locate the sources of dust that have impacted people in southwestern New Mexico, northwestern Chihuahua, and west Texas. Researchers continued surveillance of dust storms and determined the latitude and longitude of each event. To better understand the characteristics of the land surface from where the dust emission occurs, researchers identified more than 2,000 locations responsible for a dust plume as seen in satellite imagery and are in the process of understanding the state-of-the-land surface at those locations. Researchers also have started work to construct a synoptic climatology of these dust storms to increase their ability to forecast these events.

Dust storms in the Southwest United States and northern Mexico continue to create serious health and safety issues. In a continued effort to locate the sources of dust, researchers continued surveillance of dust storms and determined the latitude and longitude of these storms.

Findings: Researchers completed their work designing a method to characterize dust storm events using data from the North American Regional Reanalysis model archive. Based on 60 dust storm events, they generated patterns to compare with non-dust days. While that method proved to be successful in identifying dust storms, it also identified other non-dust events. One particular variable that needs to be included in the future is soil moisture.

For more information documenting dust events that impacted New Mexico, northwestern Chihuahua, and west Texas: (http://nmborderaq.blogspot.com/)

For videos published on the New Mexico Climate Center’s YouTube channel to support outreach on climate, air quality, and projects at the New Mexico Climate Center: (https://www.youtube.com/NMClimate).

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 examines the impacts of drought and climate change on climate sensitive sectors in the Southwest, focusing on agriculture, outdoor recreation, and tourism. Drafted a funded grant proposal on Economic Impacts on Drought on Agriculture, Recreational Tourism, and Rural Communities to a combination of NIDIS and the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Paleohydrologic information collected from tree rings have become valuable tools for drought planning and water resources management. The goal of this project is to expand that usefulness to a broader range of water provid­ers and resource managers. The TreeFlow website includes pages for accessing, evaluating, and downloading reconstructions of streamflow for a number of western river basins, examples of applications to water resource management, and information about past workshops for water resource managers (including instructional PowerPoint presentations.

Persistent drought and climate change affect water and energy costs, and hence choices made by farms, cities and industrial water and energy users, as well as energy and water providers’ operations. This project examines potential climate change and variability adaptation strategies related to water and energy in the Colorado River and Rio Grande Basins, including northwestern Mexico. Researchers are investigating how climate influences the market price of water and developing a menu of water and energy supply reliability tools with guidelines for using these tools.

This project examines the potential for market mechanisms to facilitate voluntary reallocation of scarce water across different uses, specifically from agricultural to environmental purposes. It considers the scope for using reverse water auctions to obtain water for riparian restoration. This includes study of the economic theory behind reversed auctions as well as lessons from applications. It also examines the scope of the USDA Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) to complement state and local programs for environmental water acquisitions.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have access to proprietary data on prices and quantities of water market trades. A hypothesis of the CLIMAS research is that USDA data on crop rental rates can be used to assess what likely water transfer prices will be. We plan to collaborate in the coming year, combining data to test this hypothesis.

This project assessed the impact that the National Seasonal Assessment Workshop (NSAW) seasonal and monthly fire outlooks have on decision makers who collaborate to manage wildfires in the western U.S. Researchers asked who uses the in­formation in these products, for what purposes, and the economic benefits of using them. This project evaluated how these products are being used and also analyzed network patterns across regional and federal networks of fire management to see how information was communicated across agencies.