tracking & preventing drought impacts...wilhite, donald a., mark d. svoboda, and michael j....

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

ksmith2@unl.edu

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