U32C-01
A Vision of International Drought Monitoring Across the Western Hemisphere
Drought is an environmental hazard which results in billions of dollars in economic losses as well as societal suffering and increased mortality in many parts of the world each year. No country is immune from its effects and there is documented evidence of an increasing trend in droughts in many regions since the 1970s. There is also a high likelihood of droughts affecting an ever larger proportion of the world as global temperatures continue to rise. This reality along with the wide-ranging societal and economic impacts of drought upon the world's countries calls out for coordinated international drought monitoring and response. A demonstration of the potential for contributions through international collaboration was made through the establishment of a North American Drought Monitor (NADM) partnership between the United States, Mexico, and Canada in 2002. The United States has also recently initiated development of a National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) to coordinate drought monitoring, mitigation, and research activities at federal, state, and local levels within the United States. Building on the successes and lessons learned from these ongoing activities, efforts are now underway to establish linkages with other countries throughout the Western Hemisphere to begin building a hemispheric-wide drought monitoring program. Partnerships already established through the Earth Observation Partnership of the Americas (EOPA) and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) will be an integral part of this new effort. In view of the significant impacts of drought, its international scale, the likelihood of droughts becoming more frequent, severe, and widespread, and the efforts to establish international observational systems and partnerships, this presentation will explore the prospects of expanding international drought monitoring across the Western Hemisphere.
U32C-02
Development and Applications of the U.S. Drought Monitor and North America Drought Monitor
Drought is an important climatological phenomenon which has significant socioeconomic and environmental
impacts. Several drought indices have been developed during the last hundred years to quantify drought, but all
of them either were developed for specific applications and/or regions, or have limitations which restrict their use.
In the U.S., a drought monitoring tool was developed in the late 1990s through a federal-state collaborative effort
to consolidate and centralize drought monitoring activities. This tool, the U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM), consists
of a weekly map and narrative product which describes current drought conditions according to a scale ranging
from moderate drought (D1) to exceptional drought (D4). Conditions which are dry but not yet of drought severity
are categorized as abnormally dry (D0). The USDM draws its strength from the collaborative input at the federal
(USDA, NOAA), regional (NOAA Regional Climate Centers), state, and local levels and from the objective
synthesis of several drought-related indices. In late 2002, the methodology of the USDM was extended
internationally to develop the North America Drought Monitor (NADM), which is a monthly map and narrative
product that describes drought across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. This paper will describe the development of
the USDM and NADM, and discuss examples of their applications.
http:www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/monitoring/drought/nadm/index.html
U32C-03
Advance of the Monitor of Drought for the Northern Region of Mexico
In the last 13 years, the State of Chihuahua suffered a lingering drought that caused social, economical and environmental impacts hardly quantifiable. Since 2002, a monitoring system was implemented to watch the evolution of the meteorological drought in Chihuahua, recently being broadened for the states in the North of Mexico. Evaluation of the Meteorological Drought The Monitoring System on the Drought in Chihuahua includes the following steps: missing data gaps were completed basing on the statistical procedures described by Young (1992); the source code, was compiled to create a computer program, with which it can be derived a level of climatic station, historical series of values for the SPI in time scales of 1 to 48 months; under this classification scheme, it is considered that a drought event begins when the values of the SPI are inferior to -0.7 (McKee et al. 1995). The spatial distribution of the SPI was determined through spatial interpolation techniques using a reverse method of the distance between stations included in Arc/InfoŠ. This same procedure was applied for the States of Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango and Zacatecas with the purpose of implementing this tool for the north of Mexico. Advances on the Monitoring System The monitoring system allows an analysis of the frequency, duration and intensity of the drought events that took place in several climatic regions (Núñez-López et al., 2005); un map of spatial distribution of the SPI for the northern region of Mexico, in the States of Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua. The generated map will be published in a section on the CEISS web page (www.sequia.edu.mx), together with the monthly bulletin available to the public in general; it is monitoring to an annual scale, the tendencies of the deficits or surplus of the runoff volumes on three of the main dams in the State of Chihuahua Conclusions The Drought Monitoring System in Chihuahua complies with the following international rules for the estimation of the SPI: 1. It is estimated with the standardized index of precipitation used internationally, is special the Drought Monitor Center en Nebraska (E.U.A.) 2. It has as a normal media a historical series of at least 30 years of monthly precipitation. 3. The source code developed was compiled to create a computer program, with which you can derive to a climatic level, historical series of values of the SPI on time scales of 1 to 48 months. 4. The interpolation of values was classified with the current systems accepted internationally. 5. It has as a complement the annual pursuit of the hydrological drought on the level of the basin of the Conchos River through three of the main dams, an index of the deficits of the runof volume is employed and one index of the hydrological drought tendency employed in different parts of the world. Mentioned Literature Nuñez-López D., C.A. Muñoz-Robles, G. Hector, V.M. Reyes-Gómez, 2006. Caractérisation, á diverses échelles de temps, des séquences de sécheresse dans l'état de chihuahua (Mexique). Science et Changements Planétaires - Sécheresse 17(4) : 467-474. McKee, T., N. Doesken, and J. Kleist, "Drought Monitoring with Multiple Time Scales.", Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Applied Climatology, Boston MA, U.S.A., 1995, 233-236 pp. Young, K.C., "A Three-Way Model for Interpolating for Monthly Precipitation Values.", Monthly Weather Review, Vol. 120, Boston, MA. U.S.A., 1992, 2561-2569 pp.