Overview - About Drought

Drought Assessment Overview

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The 2006 Precipitation Anomaly Map indicates the change in total precipitation for the months May through August compared with the 30-year average (1971-2000) for the same period.

This 2006 Temperature Anomaly Scale uses spatially averaged mean temperature over the five UMAC states to reveal sustained above average temperatures throughout the growing season.

Project Scope
The Northern Great Plains are notorious for their weather extremes. The summer of 2005 was exceptionally wet in North Dakota which ruined crops in several areas. The summer of 2006 was exact opposite. Mother Nature silently settled into a pattern of below average precipitation and above average temperatures through out the growing season. With Central South Dakota as the epicenter, the severe drought that swept through several parts of the Northern Great Plains caused serious losses to the incomes of farmers and ranchers in the region.

Unlike floods and hurricanes which results in instantaneously devastating impacts, the impacts of drought are slow but steady.

Quantitative information is needed to document the extent of drought, and to make informed decisions, and to convince policy makers of the magnitude of the problem.

Drought Assessment Project Goals

Magnitude & Severity
The goals of this project are to better understand the magnitude and severity of drought and to contribute to its quantification through a focus on the summer 2006 drought. The end result of this analysis will be tools to assist planners, policy makers and end-users like farmers and ranchers in the Northern Great Plains in their planning and disaster relief activities.

Our goals will be accomplished by:

Collecting, compiling and analyzing remotely-sensed surrogates of vegetation growth indicators such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI)
Collecting, compiling and analyzing climate and other related information that causes the chain of events leading to drought
Assessing the usefulness of these new information through the UMAC's "learning community" approach

We will also document the past droughts in the Great Plains using remotely-sensed data which could be used for further research on the occurrence of extreme events, climate change and variability in the Northern Great Plains.