DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGH-RESOLUTION DROUGHT TRIGGER TOOL (HIDRTT) FOR THE UNITED STATES

For drought triggers and decision-making, there is an unmet need for drought assessment information at the local (sub-county) scale. A daily precipitation analysis produced by the National Weather Service could potentially serve as input to a drought trigger tool, but the analysis includes long-term biases due to radar calibration and other issues that detrimentally affect the estimates of drought severity. This project will develop a reliable technique for calibrating the daily precipitation analysis to minimize biases in estimates of accumulated precipitation, perform a statistical analysis of the historical precipitation record so that the precipitation analyses can be converted to drought index information, create a web-based delivery system for the drought index information so that the products can be tested and evaluated in different parts of the United States, and estimate the effectiveness and benefit of the drought index information. The project, a collaboration between investigators at Texas A&M University, North Carolina State University, and Purdue University, will lay the ground work for nationwide drought monitoring at the local scale. The long-range benefit to agriculture of this project will be to improve the resiliency of agriculture through more accurate drought response decisions and more precise identification and relief for agricultural producers suffering under drought. These drought tools will enable location-specific decision-making designed to reduce the risk of loss or of more serious water restrictions at a later date.