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Tracking & Preventing Drought ImpactsK E L LY H E L M S M I T H , S I O U X C I T Y, S O U T H D A KOTA , O C TO B E R 1 0 , 20 1 8
N O R T H E R N G R E AT P L A I N S C L I M AT E W O R K S H O P
What is a drought impact?“An observable loss or change that occurred at a specific place and time because of drought.”
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Why track drought impacts?
Research: How do biophysical indicators relate to social and environmental indicators?
Need longitudinal data.
Response & Recovery: Who really needs help?
Planning: What do we want to prevent?
N A T I O N A L D R O U G H T M I T I G A T I O N C E N T E R
Droughts are defined by those who experience the impacts Types of
Drought
Meteorological
Agricultural
Hydrological
Socio-economic
Ecological
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Drought Planning: The Big Questions
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
What do you want to protect?
What can you do ahead of time? During
drought?
How will you know you are in drought?
Scale matters
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Photo: Compiled by Chuck Nelson. “A true-color cropped image of portion of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. This image was taken from a California Department of Fish and Game website available to the public as a GIS file and is part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Imagery Program flight.” http://www.csuchico.edu/inside/2012-05-10/bigpicture-2.shtml
From Bandera: Cowboy Capital of the World, Palo Alto College, San Antonio, Texashttp://pacweb.alamo.edu/InteractiveHistory/projects/rhines/StudentProjects/1999/bandera/BANDERA.htm
Earth as seen from space. Courtesy of NASA.
Sub-state drought planning authority in the Missouri River Basin, compiled by Theresa Jedd, National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska
Drought Center supports planning at all scales
Planning is a “living” process
Individual
Community
Tribal/State
Basin
Nation
State drought planning“mitigation” vs. “response”
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
https://drought.unl.edu/droughtplanning/InfobyState.aspx
“mitigation” vs. “response”
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Created by Luis_molineroFreepik.com
Other images courtesy of Health.gov
Drought-Ready Communitieshttp://drought.unl.edu/Planning/PlanningProcesses/DroughtReadyCommunities.aspx
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Impacts &
Vulnerability:
• How have past
droughts affected
you?
• How would a
future drought
affect you?
• What do you need
to protect?
Monitoring:
• How dry is it?
What will you
measure?
• Who is
keeping
watch?
• Who needs to
know?
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
What do you want to protect?
Impacts:• How has drought
affected you in the past?
• How is drought affecting you now?
• How would drought affect you in the future?
Vulnerability x hazard = impact
Drought intensity, duration
• Subsistence agriculture
• Shallow wells• Poor soil
What you can control: Reduce vulnerability ahead of time
x =
Impacts point to underlying vulnerability. “Solve for” vulnerability.
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
What do you want to protect?
https://californiawaterblog.com/2017/08/06/small-self-sufficient-water-systems-continue-to-battle-a-hidden-drought/
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
How will you know you are in drought?
Drought Monitoring & Early Warning
Establish an operational definition or definitions of drought, based at least in part on the impacts that you want to prevent.• large-scale climate indicator• locally-relevant water supply indicator
WHO is monitoring drought regularly?
WHO needs to know when it gets worse?
How can the general public tune in to drought monitoring?
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
http://www.droughtmanagement.info/indices/
https://hprcc.unl.edu/maps.php?map=ACISClimateMaps
http://nasagrace.unl.edu/
For more: • Drought.unl.edu• Drought.gov
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
How will you know you are in drought?
Establish TriggersLink stages of response to measurable indicatorsLincoln example
What can you do during drought?
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
What can you do ahead of time? During
drought?
Mitigation Actions• Adopt agricultural practices that enhance soil health• Manage for multiple priorities, not just one (i.e., don’t
prioritize agriculture and deprecate ecosystem services)• Purchase, position firefighting equipment• Enhance water supply and storage infrastructure• Revise laws/policies to align incentives with increased
drought resilience
Response Actions• Hay hotline• Haul water• Food distribution• Mental health hotlines• Water use restrictions
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Stakeholder, public buy-in
Involve key stakeholder groups in impact assessment subcommittees
Keep the general public informed
Monitor drought at regular intervals, even when there is none
Develop messaging ahead of time to request behavioral changes
Involve people
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Authority, political will
Who leads drought planning?
What authority do they have?
What is the scope or jurisdiction of the plan?
What is the overarching purpose or motivator of the plan?
Plans need to be formally adopted.
Make it official
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
What do you want to protect?
What can you do ahead of time? During
drought?
How will you know you are in drought?
Authority, political will
Stakeholder, public buy-in
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
“In essence, as with rainbows, each person experiences their own drought.”Redmond, Kelly T. “The Depiction of Drought: A Commentary.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, August 2002, Vol. 83, Issue 8, p. 1143.
http://121clicks.com/gallery-category/nature-subtle
Drought Impact Reporter
• Launched in 2005, in response to calls for a comprehensive archive of drought impacts
• Reports from media, individual observers (“Users,” CoCoRaHS), agencies
• Searchable by time, place, scale, category, term
• Moderated @ NDMC
Wilhite, Donald A., Mark D. Svoboda, and Michael J. Hayes. "Understanding the complex impacts of drought: a key to enhancing drought mitigation and preparedness." Water resources management 21.5 (2007): 763-774. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1042&context=droughtfacpub
Questions & ChallengesNo methodology for valuing or quantifying drought impacts
◦ Even in agriculture
No units
Easier to list than to summarize impacts
“Angst index”
Disincentives to sharing some info◦ Proprietary
◦ Competitive
On the up side …
Resource for drought historians
Impacts include attribution – we know drought caused it
Using media’s agenda-setting function to ID impacts that matter
Awareness – of what? Is there data re/ underlying trend?
Image courtesy of Muscatine Power and Waterhttps://www.mpw.org/news-events/news/tips-from-the-pros/the-flags-and-paint-mean
Inventory of drought impact dataBY SECTOR
Agriculture
Hydropower
Tourism & Recreation
Ecosystems: plants & animals
Public health◦ Domestic wells
◦ Environmental health
BY TIME
Cumulative, end-of-season vs.
Real-time, “condition-monitoring”
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Could always be better, but fairly well-represented. Some quantification possible, depending on USDA’s
National Agricultural Statistics Service data collection for particular crops and places.
• NASS data: Not all crops, and not always timely release, to protect proprietary information.
• Farm Service Agency reports: Valuable field-level reports at weekly time intervals, but sometimes
aggregated to large spatial area. Requires finding and reading each one individually. Not convenient.
• Risk Management Agency crop indemnity losses: Good source of annual losses to commodity crops due
to drought.
Agricultural Sector: Data exists, but is it enough?
Hydropower & Energy:Data exists. Do decision makers need something more or different?
Public water suppliesStates track differently.
Private domestic
wells.Most states
don’t track(?)
Public health other than domestic water
Connections in US not well-articulated. Anecdotal reports and a few studies on • Stress• Mortality• Hospital admissions due to air quality• Vector-borne disease
Tourism & RecreationData exists but it may be proprietary, and/or there may be a disincentive to sharing.
WASHINGTON STATE SKI VISITS (SOURCE: NATIONAL SKI AREAS ASSOCIATION)From them Washington State drought plan revision, vulnerability chapter
In the winter of 2004/2005, visitation to Washington State ski resorts dropped by 1.5 million visits from the prior year, a decrease of 77 percent. During the 2014/2015 winter, visitation numbers dropped by more than 900,000 visits from the previous year, a decrease of 59 percent.
Other suggestions:• Transient Room Taxes,
collected by the county • Pacific Northwest Skiers
Association (including some proprietary information)
• Travel Oregon
Environment / ecosystem services
• Perpetually under-resourced. • Endangered species well-tracked (?)• Otherwise, could use more data. • Where to start?
• Vegetation reports?
DIR or something similar could be used for monitoring native perennials and invasive annuals, especially cheatgrass and more recently, medusa head. “…someone would take a picture and note that this whole hillside is cheatgrass. Grass is relatively easy to identify, and we if have a georeference for that we could probably figure out which hillside is that and in the office we could create a polygon” (6).
Range management suggestion:
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Looking for the drought signal (“impacts”) in records of human experience: when to count the news and when to read it
Allen Telescope Array, courtesy SETI Institute
• CoCoRaHS reports• Survey123 reports• Media stories• Tweets
South Dakota User Reports, 2017, by week (weeks 22-45)
Number of news stories about drought published in SD, by week, in 2017, collected via Meltwater
Number of CoCoRaHS condition reports from SD, by week, for 2017CoCoRaHS Report from Station #Newell 6.5 ENE on 10/22/2017Report Type: CoCoRaHSPublication Date: 2017-10-22Dates of Report: 2017-10-22 to 2017-10-22Source Name: Newell 6.5 ENESummary: No rain since the first week of October. Grass has dried off -palatability has decreased for cattle, soil moisture is nonexistent. Dust blows and drifts like snow where there is bare ground. Windy and hot conditions over the past week have exacerbated conditions.Url:Affected Area(s): Butte County, SDCategories:AgricultureGeneral Awareness
SD “#drought17” tweetsNote that they start abruptly in June – chart only shows weeks 22-45
#drought17 tweets for week ending July 24, 2017
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Takeaways
What do you need to protect from drought?
How can you measure it? Detect change?
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Questions, comments?
Please contact
Kelly Helm Smith
402-472-3373
drought.unl.edu
NATIONAL DROUGHT MITIGATION CENTER
Photo: Compiled by Chuck Nelson. “A true-color cropped image of portion of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. This image was taken from a California Department of Fish and Game website available to the public as a GIS file and is part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Imagery Program flight.” http://www.csuchico.edu/inside/2012-05-10/bigpicture-2.shtml
From Bandera: Cowboy Capital of the World, Palo Alto College, San Antonio, Texashttp://pacweb.alamo.edu/InteractiveHistory/projects/rhines/StudentProjects/1999/bandera/BANDERA.htm