1. 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

2. 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”

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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.

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

9. Monitoring and Prediction Methods
drought onset / recovery prediction?

10. Monitoring and Prediction MethodsWA
State
soil moisture
SWE

11. 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”