National Weather Service

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)

This scoping project explores opportunities for collaboration in the Arizona-Sonora portion of the U.S.-Mexico border region that emphasize environmental risks and air quality, small scale computing and technology, and citizen science monitoring of environmental phenomena. In fall 2018, Ben McMahan helped convene an environmental workshop to identify emergent areas of interest. This workshop led to a focus on solar heaters and their relevance to climate and air quality in the Nogales region. Another workshop is scheduled for the fall of 2019.

There are numerous avenues for collaborative research projects and outreach in the borderlands region, and this project provides a mechanism to develop new research and engagement, as well as to connect CLIMAS expertise to existing project work. Topics emphasize climate and health (environmental risks and air quality), small scale computing, technology, and citizen science monitoring of environmental phenomena, emergent CLIMAS specific outreach and network development, and small-scale solar feasibility.

Extreme heat is already a key public health risk in the adjacent cities of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Projected temperature changes, combined with the urban heat island effect and regional poverty, expose urban areas with high vulnerabilities to heat-health risks.

The proposed initiative aims to increase preparedness and capacity to adapt to extreme high temperatures and heat waves in Rio Grande-Bravo Basin border cities by: a) identifying key heat health parameters and target populations for heat health early warning; b) assessing and developing capacity for coordinated heat health early warning; c) facilitating the sharing of best practices; and d) initiating development toward a community of practice within a network of regional cities.

Importance: This project explicitly connects CLIMAS with the NOAA-CDC National Integrated Heat Health Information System initiative and with an international network of similar projects aimed at implementing the Global Framework for Climate Services.

Additonal Information:

Project website

July 2016 Workshop Report Executive Summary: English Español

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.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) plays a critical role in helping land, water, and coastal managers prepare for and respond to diverse weather and climate-driven extreme events. Challenges to accessing, interpreting, and disseminating diverse climate and weather (C&W) information, however, limit FEMA’s use of this information, which can impede pre-positioning resources in high-risk areas, delay advanced warnings, and spur misunderstanding. Strategic partnerships that link information producers and consumers and provide opportunities for co-developing useful C&W information can help agencies like FEMA better fulfill their mandate to safeguard life and property. This project examines the process of developing strategic partnerships, communication strategies, and relevant C&W information to support FEMA’s hazards monitoring efforts in Arizona, Nevada, and California. This study examines the end-to-end process of decision support and will be conducted within a framework advocated by the National Research Council. This incudes: assessing FEMA’s C&W information needs and gaps; coproducing a decision-support tool; and measuring impacts, successes, and limitations of the decision-support tool, engagement process, and partnership. The objectives are to better understand how to provide climate services and develop strategies that seamlessly transition from research to operations, while assessing the role of ‘boundary organizations’ (e.g., RISAs) in developing and mediating partnerships that advance climate services and long-term adaptation efforts.

The decision support tool developed through this project is a climate dashboard. It presents historical hydroclimate risk, current climate conditions, and information about future climate. http://www.climas.arizona.edu/content/fema-dashboard-2

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).

Barriers to the use of climate information can be met with innovative tools that offer users the ability to perform custom­ized analyses. This project works to develop such tools, with a commitment to ongoing user engagement and adaptation of the tools. In addition, tools that have proved successful in regional applications may be usefully extended to new regions. Rather than simply transfer the software, we develop partner capacities to implement collaborative software development protocols and processes. Tools developed, maintained, or extended under this project include the Climate Information Delivery and Decision Support System (CLIDDSS), the Forecast Evaluation Tool (FET), the Dynamic Drought Index Tool (DDIT) developed by Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (CISA), AgroClimate developed by the Southeast Climate Consortium (SECC), and the PaleoToolKit developed in conjunction with the Western Water Assessment (WWA) and CLIMAS-affiliated researchers. For more on each of these products, visit the Tools page.

Early in the CLIMAS project, dialogue with stakeholders clearly identified significant barriers precluding more extensive and effective use of hydroclimatic forecasts, including lack of relevant and quantifiable forecast skill, misinterpretation of forecast products, and inability to place forecasts in historical context. Qualitative aspects of forecasts can be as important as any quantitative attribute in affecting how users interpret, apply, and ultimately judge probabilistic forecasts. Significant work is needed to develop forecast products that can be interpreted easily, correctly, and reliably without the need for special training. This project applied techniques for assessing forecast performance, qualitatively and quantitatively, with the intention of helping stakeholders appropriately align forecast use with measures of forecast skill. Researchers also examined the impacts of misinterpretation of forecast products.

The updated podcast is now broadcast monthly. visit: http://www.climas.arizona.edu/media/podcasts for more details.

Since Fall 2006, CLIMAS has provided online, interactive seasonal climate briefings and podcasts for the Southwest and northern Mexico. The briefings have provided an interactive supplement to the monthly Southwest Climate Outlook, including an up-to-date summary of seasonal hydroclimate conditions and forecasts. Stakeholders can ask questions about climate information and receive answers immediately. In 2008 and 2009, regional National Weather Service offices became active partners in the briefings, presenting analyses of recent conditions and forecasts. These briefings also generated news articles in local newspapers and radio shows.

Beginning with a seminal workshop in 2000, organized by CLIMAS and University of Arizona scientists, CLIMAS has been a leader in the process of bridging the worlds of fire managers and climate researchers. The initial workshop in 2000 spawned two workshops in 2001: Fire and Climate in the Southwest and Fire and Climate 2001 in the West. The success of these meetings led to the 2002 Fire in the West workshop. These annual workshops brought fire managers, applied fire researchers, and climate forecasters together to exchange information and ideas. This process has evolved into a partnership to evaluate the potential for significant wildland fire activity, which became institutionalized in the form of the National Seasonal Assessment Workshops (2003-2012), and fully operationalized by the National Interagency Coordination Center.

The National Seasonal Assessment Workshops (NSAW) were developed by a partnership between CLIMAS, the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Predictive Services (NICC), and the Program for Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications (CEFA) at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. The impetus for the partnership and associated workshops is to improve information available to fire management decision makers for allocation of firefighting resources at local, regional, and national scales. The collaboration is grounded in a commitment to sustained interaction between partnering institutions, equality in partnership, and clear partnership responsibilities.

In collaboration with 11 Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs), NOAA Climate Prediction Center, California Applications Program RISA, Western Water Assessment RISA, Southeast Climate Consortium RISA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Experimental Climate Prediction Center, and others, the NSAWs brought together fire meteorologists, fire behavior analysts, fuel specialists, fire managers, climate forecasters, and climate researchers for a focused exchange of ideas and work sessions. The workshop participants produced pre-season fire potential outlooks for the eastern half of the U.S. (in January each year), and the western half of the U.S. plus Alaska (in late March or early April each year).

In 2007, the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Predictive Services began to operationalize national monthly and seasonal outlooks, on an experimental basis. Since then, these “monthly-seasonal outlooks” are produced by NICC, with input from partners in the applied climate forecasting and fire management and research communities. CLIMAS continues to be involved with fire prediction efforts, primarily through the work of CLIMAS affiliate, Tim Brown and through the North American Climate Services Partnership.