HR: 12:05h
AN: H32B-08    [Abstracts]
TI: The Canada DRI, a new Drought Research Initiative for the Canadian Prairies
AU: * Pomeroy, J W
EM: pomeroy@usask.ca
AF: University of Saskatchewan, Centre for Hydrology, 117 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C8 Canada
AU: Stewart, R
EM: ronald.stewart@mcgill.ca
AF: McGill University, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, 805 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, PQ H3A 2K6 Canada
AB: Drought is ubiquitous in the global water cycle and a relatively common feature of the North American and Canadian climate and hydrology regimes. Droughts are hydrometeorological disasters with major impacts on a wide range of sectors in Canada including agriculture, forestry, industry, municipalities, hydroelectric generation, recreation, health, and aquatic ecosystems. The Canadian Prairies are particularly prone to drought; most recently one that began in 1999 with cessation of its atmospheric component in 2004 and hydrological components in 2005. DRI is the Drought Research Initiative, a new research network of university and federal/provincial government researchers to address Canadian prairie drought with expertise drawn from the atmospheric, hydrological, land surface, and predictive aspects of droughts. The overall objective of DRI is to better understand the physical characteristics of and processes influencing Canadian Prairie droughts, and to contribute to their better prediction, through a focus on the recent severe drought that began in 1999. To address this objective, DRI focuses on three main activities. It will quantify the physical features of the recent drought including its spatial and temporal features, flows of atmospheric and surface water and energy into and out of the region and their storage and redistribution within the region using a mixture of surface observations, remote sensing and model outputs - this will be the most comprehensive drought description ever conducted in Canada. It will improve understanding of the processes and feedbacks governing the formation, evolution, cessation and structure of the drought by reanalysing atmospheric, remote sensing, surface observation and research basin records from the drought to explore teleconnections, local atmospheric-surface feedbacks and hydrological dynamics. It will assess and reduce uncertainties in the prediction of drought and its structure by employing a spatially nested modelling strategy using global to regional climate simulations, and numerical weather prediction models coupled to hydrology and groundwater models. By coupling studies of the atmospheric system to surface hydrology and groundwater it will provide a unique and innovative perspective on water and energy cycling over well marked summer and winter seasons in a dry continental interior.
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1812 Drought
DE: 1840 Hydrometeorology
DE: 3314 Convective processes
DE: 3322 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218, 1631, 1843)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005