HR: 08:15h
AN: PP31F-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Putting Current North America Drought Conditions Into a Multi-Century Perspective. Part 2: Using the Blended Product in Operational Drought Monitoring
AU: * Heim, R R
EM: Richard.Heim@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AU: Vose, R S
EM: Russell.Vose@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AU: Lawrimore, J H
EM: Jay.Lawrimore@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA/National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AU: Cook, E R
EM: drdendro@ldeo.columbia.edu
AF: Tree-Ring Laboratory, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY 10964, United States
AB: Drought is an important climatological phenomenon which has significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Several drought indices have been developed to quantify drought, and all of them rely on meteorological observations taken at instrumented in situ weather stations. The instrumental record for drought monitoring in the U.S. extends back only about a hundred years, and the record is even shorter in other countries such as Canada and Mexico. As a result, recurrence intervals and water management compacts (for example, the Colorado River Basin domestic or Rio Grande international compacts) based upon such short records may not be built upon the long-term climatology of a region. Reliable drought information can be derived from paleoclimatic data such as tree-rings, thus enabling researchers and decision-makers to assess drought variability and impacts over a multi-century period. Previous work has developed research-quality paleoclimatic drought reconstructions which have been used in retrospective analyses but, until now, such data have not been used comprehensively in operational monitoring. Part 1 of this paper describes the development of the reconstructed paleoclimatic Palmer drought index gridded dataset for North America from tree-ring data. Part 2 of this paper describes how the reconstructed paleoclimatic data base is blended with a 20th century instrumental- based Palmer drought index gridded dataset for operational drought monitoring applications across North America.
DE: 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513)
DE: 1812 Drought
DE: 3344 Paleoclimatology (0473, 4900)
DE: 4920 Dendrochronology
DE: 9350 North America
SC: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology [PP]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting