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The sky island forests of the southwestern United States are one of the most diverse temperate forest ecosystems in the world, providing key habitat for migrating and residential species alike. Black bear, bighorn sheep, mule deer, and wild turkey are just a few of the species found in these isolated mountain ecosystems that rise out of the desert landscape. However, recent droughts have crippled these ecosystems, causing significant tree death. Climate predictions suggest that this region will only face hotter and drier conditions in the future, potentially stressing these ecosystems even further. Simple models predict that vegetation will move to cooler and wetter locations in response to this warming. However,...
Abstract (from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gdj3.47/abstract): Two datasets of soil temperature observations collected at Norman, Oklahoma, USA, were analysed to study horizontal and vertical variability in their observations. The first dataset comprised 15-min resolution soil temperature observations from 20 September 2011 to 18 November 2013 in seven plots across a 10-m transect. In each plot, sensors were located at depths of 5, 10, and 30 cm. All seven plots observed fairly consistent maximum soil temperature observations during the spring, fall, and winter months. Starting in late May, the observed spread in soil temperatures across the 10-m transect increased significantly until August when the...
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The South Central U.S. is one of the main agricultural regions in North America: annual agricultural production is valued at more than $44 billion dollars. However, as climate conditions change, the region is experiencing more frequent and severe droughts, with significant impacts on agriculture and broader consequences for land management. For example, in 2011 drought caused an estimated $7.6 billion in agricultural losses in Texas and an additional $1.6 billion in Oklahoma. Although there are many drought monitoring tools available, most of these tools were developed without input from the stakeholders, such as farmers and ranchers, who are intended to use them. The goal of this project was to assess the information...
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The threat of droughts and their associated impacts on the landscape and human communities has long been recognized in the United States, especially in high risk areas such as the South Central region. There is ample literature on the effects of long-term climate change and short-term climate variability on the occurrence of droughts. However, it is unclear whether this information meets the needs of relevant stakeholders and actually contributes to reducing the vulnerability or increasing the resilience of communities to droughts. For example, are the methods used to characterize the severity of drought – known as drought indices – effective tools for predicting the actual damage felt by communities? As droughts...
The Department of the Interior Climate Science Centers (CSCs) and their managing organization, the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey, have chosen the emerging climate science field of Ecological Drought as a research focus area. This workshop is part of a series of meetings at each of the nation’s eight CSCs aimed at collating our existing knowledge of the ecological impacts, resistance, and recovery from drought. The eight CSCs provide a fantastic opportunity to compare the ecological effects of drought, related research activities, and management options at different regions, spatial scales, and biomes.
The responses of individual species to environmental changes can be manifested at multiple levels that range from individual-level (i.e., behavioral responses) to population-level (i.e., demographic) impacts. Major environmental changes that ultimately result in population level impacts are often first detected as individual-level responses. For example, herbivores respond to limited forage availability during drought periods by increasing the duration of foraging periods and expanding home range areas to compensate for the reduction in forage. However, if the individual-level responses are not sufficient to compensate for reduced forage availability, reduced survival and reproductive rates may result. We studied...
Abstract (from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174045): Several studies have projected increases in drought severity, extent and duration in many parts of the world under climate change. We examine sources of uncertainty arising from the methodological choices for the assessment of future drought risk in the continental US (CONUS). One such uncertainty is in the climate models’ expression of evaporative demand (E0), which is not a direct climate model output but has been traditionally estimated using several different formulations. Here we analyze daily output from two CMIP5 GCMs to evaluate how differences in E0 formulation, treatment of meteorological driving data, choice of GCM,...
Abstract (from ScienceDirect): Paleohydrologic records can provide unique, long-term perspectives on streamflow variability and hydroclimate for use in water resource planning. Such long-term records can also play a key role in placing both present day events and projected future conditions into a broader context than that offered by instrumental observations. However, relative to other major river basins across the western United States, a paucity of streamflow reconstructions has to date prevented the full application of such paleohydrologic information in the Upper Missouri River Basin. Here we utilize a set of naturalized streamflow records for the Upper Missouri and an expanded network of tree-ring records...
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Climate change may affect ecosystem functioning through increased temperatures or changes in precipitation patterns. Temperature and water availability are important drivers for ecosystem processes such as photosynthesis, carbon translocation, and organic matter decomposition. These climate changes may affect the supply of carbon and energy to the soil microbial population and subsequently alter decomposition and mineralization, important ecosystem processes in carbon and nutrient cycling. In this study, carried out within the cross-European research project CLIMOOR, the effect of climate change, resulting from imposed manipulations, on carbon dynamics in shrubland ecosystems was examined. We performed a 14C-labeling...
Declining reservoir storage has raised the specter of the first water shortage on the Lower Colorado River since the completion of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. This focusing event spurred modeling efforts to frame alternatives for managing the reservoir system during prolonged droughts. This paper addresses the management challenges that arise when using modeling tools to manage water scarcity under variable hydroclimatology, shifting use patterns, and institutional complexity. Assumptions specified in modeling simulations are an integral feature of public processes. The policymaking and management implications of assumptions are examined by analyzing four interacting sources of physical and institutional uncertainty:...
ABSTRACT: The pressure on water resources from energy resource development and transformation is likely to be greater in the future than it has been in the past. A rational resolution of the political problems that this situation will generate requires that: 1) planning based on predictions of future energy supply and demand be replaced by scenario, or “what if?” analysis; 2) full attention be paid to the uncertainties in per-unit-energy water requirements; 3) suitable stochastic measures of water availability be used to compare water supply with water demand; 4) realistic ecological criteria, and other alternative use criteria, be developed for estimating impacts of water withdrawn or consurned for energy development;...
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This dataset shows the predicted area of high fire potential for the current year up to the end of the forecast period as simulated by a modified version of the MC1 Dynamic General Vegetation Model (DGVM). The area of high fire potential is where PDSI and MC1-calculated values of potential fire behavior (fireline intensity for forest and shrubland and rate of spread of spread for grassland) exceed calibrated threshold values. Potential fire behavior in MC1 is estimated using National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) formulas, monthly climatic (temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity) data, and fuel moisture and loading estimates. Monthly climatic data includes recorded values up to the last observed...
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This dataset shows the predicted area of high fire potential for the current year up to the end of the forecast period as simulated by a modified version of the MC1 Dynamic General Vegetation Model (DGVM). The area of high fire potential is where PDSI and MC1-calculated values of potential fire behavior (fireline intensity for forest and shrubland and rate of spread of spread for grassland) exceed calibrated threshold values. Potential fire behavior in MC1 is estimated using National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) formulas, monthly climatic (temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity) data, and fuel moisture and loading estimates. Monthly climatic data includes recorded values up to the last observed...
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The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) is a measure of drought derived from both precipitation and temperature. Negative (i.e., dry) values of PDSI are closely associated with a high potential for wildland fire. PDSI is based on a supply-and-demand model of soil moisture originally developed by Wayne Palmer, who published his method in the 1965 paper Meteorological Drought for the Office of Climatology of the U.S. Weather Bureau.The index has proven to be most effective in indicating long-term drought (or wetness) over a matter of several months. PDSI calculations are standardized for an individual station (or grid cell) based on the long-term variability of precipitation and temperature at that location....
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This dataset shows the predicted area of high fire potential for the current year up to the end of the forecast period as simulated by a modified version of the MC1 Dynamic General Vegetation Model (DGVM). The area of high fire potential is where PDSI and MC1-calculated values of potential fire behavior (fireline intensity for forest and shrubland and rate of spread of spread for grassland) exceed calibrated threshold values. Potential fire behavior in MC1 is estimated using National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) formulas, monthly climatic (temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity) data, and fuel moisture and loading estimates. Monthly climatic data includes recorded values up to the last observed...
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This dataset shows the predicted area of high fire potential for the current year up to the end of the forecast period as simulated by a modified version of the MC1 Dynamic General Vegetation Model (DGVM). The area of high fire potential is where PDSI and MC1-calculated values of potential fire behavior (fireline intensity for forest and shrubland and rate of spread of spread for grassland) exceed calibrated threshold values. Potential fire behavior in MC1 is estimated using National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) formulas, monthly climatic (temperature, precipitation, and relative humidity) data, and fuel moisture and loading estimates. Monthly climatic data includes recorded values up to the last observed...
We used regression models and information-theoretic model selection to assess the relative importance of environment, local dispersal and historical contingency as controls of the distributions of 26 common plant species in tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. We censused eighty-eight 0.09-ha plots scattered across the landscape. Environmental control, local dispersal and historical contingency were represented by environmental variables (soil moisture, slope, soil type, distance to shore, old-forest presence), a spatial autoregressive parameter (ρ), and four spatial trend variables, respectively. We built regression models, representing all combinations of the three hypotheses, for each species....
Focus: 1) Developing the U.S. Drought Portal, 2) Integrating and fostering coping strategies through research, preparedness, education and public awareness, 3) Integrating data and predictions, 4) Developing pilot programs for design and implementation of early warning systems in selected locations The U.S. Drought Portal is part of the interactive system to: Provide early warning about emerging and anticipated droughts Assimilate and quality control data about droughts and models Provide information about risk and impact of droughts to different agencies and stakeholders Provide information about past droughts for comparison and to understand current conditions Explain how to plan for and...
Categories: Web Site; Tags: drought


map background search result map search result map Climate Change Affects Carbon Allocation to the Soil in Shrublands Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response Community Resilience to Drought Hazard: An Analysis of Drought Exposure, Impacts, and Adaptation in the South Central U.S. Developing Effective Drought Monitoring Tools for Farmers and Ranchers in the South Central U.S. MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast January 2012 - October 2012 (based on CCM3V6 7-month weather forecast) MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast January-July 2012 (based on ECPC 7-month weather forecast) MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast JANUARY - JUNE 2012 (based on NSIPP 7-month weather forecast) MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast June - December 2011 (based on ECPC 7-month weather forecast) Palmer drought severity index forecast July-September 2011 (based on ECPC 7-mo weather forecast) Predicting Sky Island Forest Vulnerability to Climate Change: Fine Scale Climate Variability, Drought Tolerance, and Fire Response Community Resilience to Drought Hazard: An Analysis of Drought Exposure, Impacts, and Adaptation in the South Central U.S. Developing Effective Drought Monitoring Tools for Farmers and Ranchers in the South Central U.S. Climate Change Affects Carbon Allocation to the Soil in Shrublands MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast January 2012 - October 2012 (based on CCM3V6 7-month weather forecast) MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast January-July 2012 (based on ECPC 7-month weather forecast) MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast JANUARY - JUNE 2012 (based on NSIPP 7-month weather forecast) MC1 DGVM fire potential forecast June - December 2011 (based on ECPC 7-month weather forecast) Palmer drought severity index forecast July-September 2011 (based on ECPC 7-mo weather forecast)