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Tooling up for drought planning: GIS and satellite imagery have become an integral part of drought monitoring and planning, preparedness, and mitigation

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 17, 2009 at 7:32 am

From the Water Efficiency Journal:

There have been droughts throughout history as Paleoclimatology tree ring investigations have discovered. In the 1200s in the Southwest United States in Anasazi territory, the drought lasted for multiple decades because of extremely low precipitation, according to Richard Heim, a meteorologist with the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in North Carolina, one of the divisions of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

In the 1930s, the drought in the Midwest lasted a decade. Serious drought conditions since then have peaked and gone away in the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. Since 1999, however, drought conditions have expanded, peaked, contracted, and peaked again. It is a drought that doesn’t want to go away—a balloon that expands and contracts like no other time—as Heim explains. Since 1980, major droughts and heat waves within the US alone have resulted in costs exceeding $100 billion, easily becoming one of the most costly weather-related disasters on the continent, according to a 2000 NCDC technical report penned by Neal Lott and Tom Ross.

Droughts in the US can be tracked for the past 100 years through the Palmer Drought Index. It is a soil moisture algorithm calibrated for relatively homogeneous regions and is used by many government agencies and states to trigger drought relief programs. At the end of January, the index calculated 24% of the US was in moderate to extreme drought.

With the development of geographic information system software and satellite imagery produced by the 16 meteorological satellites now orbiting the Earth, many different products and services have emerged, says Heim. NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite Data Information Service, NCDC’s parent agency, acquires and manages the nation’s operational environmental satellites, provides data and information services, and conducts related research.

Read more from the Water Efficiency Journal by clicking here.

June 17, 2009 · Filed Under Drought, Weather & Snowpack

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