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Climate policy developers and natural resource managers frequently desire high-resolution climate data to prepare for future effects of climate change. But they face a long-standing problem: the vast majority of climate models have been run at coarse resolutions—from hundreds of kilometers in global climate models (GCMs) down to 25–50 kilometers in regional climate models (RCMs).
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,...
The Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI) is an experimental drought monitoring and early warning guidance tool. It examines how anomalous the atmospheric evaporative demand (E0; also known as "the thirst of the atmosphere") is for a given location and across a time period of interest. EDDI is multi-scalar, meaning that this period—or "timescale"—can vary to capture drying dynamics that themselves operate at different timescales; we generate EDDI at 1-week through 12-month timescales. This webpage offers a frequently updated assessment of current conditions across CONUS, southern parts of Canada, and northern parts of Mexico; a tool to generate historical time series of EDDI for a user-selected region; introductions...
Abstract (from Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution): Tallgrass prairie ecosystems in North America are heavily degraded and require effective restoration strategies if prairie specialist taxa are to be preserved. One common management tool used to restore grassland is the application of a seed-mix of native prairie plant species. While this technique is effective in the short-term, it is critical that species' resilience to changing climate be evaluated when designing these mixes. By utilizing species distribution models (SDMs), species' bioclimatic envelopes–and thus the geographic area suitable for them–can be quantified and predicted under various future climate regimes, and current seed-mixes may be modified...
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Drought events have cost the U.S. nearly $245 billion since 1980, with costs ranging from $2 to $44 billion in any given year. However, these socio-economic losses are not the only impacts of drought. Ecosystems, fish, wildlife, and plants also suffer, and these types of drought impacts are becoming more commonplace. Further, ecosystems that recover from drought are now doing so under different climate conditions than they have experienced in the past few centuries. As temperature and precipitation patterns change, “transformational drought”, or drought events that can permanently and irreversibly alter ecosystems – such as forests converting to grasslands – are a growing threat. This type of drought has cascading...
This webinar was recorded as part of the Climate Change Science and Management Webinar Series (hosted in partnership by the USGS National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center and FWS National Conservation Training Center). Webinar Summary: Accurate information on the atmospheric evaporative demand (i.e., thirst of the atmosphere) and the land-surface evaporative response (i.e., moisture supply on the land to meet the evaporative demand) is extremely important to assessing water stress on the land surface. In this webinar, the presenters will introduce real-time high resolution (1-10km) monitoring products of atmospheric evaporative demand and land-surface evaporative response models that are currently available...
Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) is remotely-sensed high-resolution information of the evaporative response from the land in near real time. LERI assesses anomalies in actual evapotranspiration (ETa), as percentiles, across the Contiguous US and northern Mexico at a 1-km spatial resolution. LERI is based on the ETa data produced by the U. S. Geological Survey using the operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEBop) model. SSEBop combines evapotranspiration fraction generated from remotely sensed MODIS thermal imagery, acquired every 8 days, with climatological atmospheric evaporative demand. To quantify LERI, a rank-based, non-parametric method is used to estimate percentiles of the SSEBop ETa,...
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In the North Central U.S., drought is a dominant driver of ecological, economic, and social stress. Drought conditions have occurred in the region due to lower precipitation, extended periods of high temperatures and evaporative demand, or a combination of these factors. This project aimed to improve our understanding of drought in the North Central region and determine what future droughts might look like over the 21st century, as climate conditions change. Researchers evaluated, with the intent to improve, available and emerging data on climate conditions that influence drought (such as changes in temperature, precipitation, evaporative demand, snow and soil moisture), as well as datasets related to the surface...
This project facilitated the engagement of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center’s (NC CASC) Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) to identify and address the physical climate science challenges that are important for ecologists and natural resource managers in the NC CASC region, as well as meet their needs for climate information to assess impacts to their desired system and develop strategies for effective climate adaptation. A drought index called the Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) was developed to provide a near real-time assessment of soil moisture conditions across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) based on satellite observations. This projects also supported development of...
This project supported the activities of the Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) at the North Central Climate Science Adaptation Center (NC CASC). These activities included foundational research into drought processes relevant to the different climatic zones and ecosystems in the NC CASC region. We examined role of the atmospheric thirst for water from the land surface (aka, Evaporative Demand), how that may change during the 21st century and affect drought related risks in the future. We developed and did outreach with a drought index called the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), that solely looks at the Evaporative Demand parameter, for its drought early warning potential, its ability to capture flash...
"Motivation": The motivation for this briefing is to examine the large inhomogeneity (step shift) in the observed temperature record at the SNOw TELemetry (SNOTEL) stations in the Intermountain West—Colorado, Utah and Wyoming—and its implications for climate, hydrology and ecological research in the region. This issue impacts the entire SNOTEL network across the 11 Western states, as demonstrated by Jared Oyler of the University of Montana and his colleagues in Oyler et al. (2015). Here we build on that work by performing finer-grained analyses, and identifying the implications for climate studies that have incorporated SNOTEL temperature data. In doing so, we intend to promote a broader awareness of this issue...
Abstract (from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-015-2692-0/fulltext.html): The future rate of climate change in mountains has many potential human impacts, including those related to water resources, ecosystem services, and recreation. Analysis of the ensemble mean response of CMIP5 global climate models (GCMs) shows amplified warming in high elevation regions during the cold season in boreal midlatitudes. We examine how the twenty-first century elevation-dependent response in the daily minimum surface air temperature [d(ΔTmin)/dz] varies among 27 different GCMs during winter for the RCP 8.5 emissions scenario. The focus is on regions within the northern hemisphere mid-latitude band between 27.5°N...
This 2-pager describes the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), which is a drought index that can serve as an indicator of both rapidly evolving “flash” droughts (developing over a few weeks) and sustained droughts (developing over months but lasting up to years).
    map background search result map search result map Foundational Science Area: Developing Climate Change Understanding and Resources for Adaptation in the North Central U.S. State of the Science Synthesis on Transformational Drought: Understanding Drought’s Potential to Transform Ecosystems Across the Country Foundational Science Area: Developing Climate Change Understanding and Resources for Adaptation in the North Central U.S. State of the Science Synthesis on Transformational Drought: Understanding Drought’s Potential to Transform Ecosystems Across the Country