Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology Commons^™

Valuation Of Drought Information: Understanding The Value Of The Us Drought Monitor In Land Management, Tingting Liu, Richard Krop, Tonya Haigh, Kelly Helm Smith, Mark D. Svoboda

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Droughts affect recreation and tourism, grazing, forests, and timber, and can have important indirect effects for the ecosystems and species that rely on water. Despite its importance, the effect of drought in the land management sector is less understood than in other water-intensive sectors, such as agriculture and public water supplies. This study presents the first-ever estimates of the economic valuation of the information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor using the avoided cost method. These estimates are based on the time and labor saved by using the U.S. Drought Monitor rather than compiling drought-related information from other sources, or …

Ranchers’ Use Of Drought Contingency Plans In Protective Action Decision Making, Tonya Haigh, Michael Hayes, Jolene Smyth, Linda Stalker Prokopy, Charles A. Francis, Mark Burbach

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Drought contingency planning is an increasingly common tool in the ranchers’ climate adaptation toolboxes, but its effect on drought response has not yet been evaluated. We use cognitive models of protective action decision making and planning to explore the effects of having a drought plan on the use of drought early warning information and drought response (and timing). Results of a cross-sectional, probability-based survey of livestock producers affected by a 2016 flash-drought are used to describe the characteristics of operations with drought plans and provide evidence of whether having a plan predicts drought information use and response. While larger operations …

Whose Ground Truth Is It? Harvesting Lessons From Missouri’S 2018 Bumper Crop Of Drought Observations, Kelly Helm Smith, Mark E. Burbach, Michael Hayes, Patrick Guinan, Andrew Tyre, Brian Fuchs, Tonya Haigh, Mark Svoboda

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Drought-related decision-making and policy should go beyond numeric hydrometeorological data to incorporate information on how drought affects people, livelihoods, and ecosystems. The effects of drought are nested within environmental and human systems, and relevant data may not exist in readily accessible form. For example, drought may reduce forage growth, compounded by both late-season freezes and management decisions. An effort to gather crowdsourced drought observations in Missouri in 2018 yielded a much higher number of observations than did previous related efforts. Here we examine 1) the interests, circumstances, history, and recruitment messaging that coincided to produce a high number of reports …

Tweetdrought: A Deep-Learning Drought Impacts Recognizer Based On Twitter Data, Beichen Zhang, Frank Schilder, Kelly Helm Smith, Michael Hayes, Sherri Harms, Tsegaye Tadesse

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Acquiring a better understanding of drought impacts becomes increasingly vital under a warming climate. Traditional drought indices describe mainly biophysical variables and not impacts on social, economic, and environmental systems. We utilized natural language processing and bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) based transfer learning to fine-tune the model on the data from the news-based Drought Impact Report (DIR) and then apply it to recognize seven types of drought impacts based on the filtered Twitter data from the United States. Our model achieved a satisfying macro-F1 score of 0.89 on the DIR test set. The model was then applied to …

Developing A Strategy For The National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network, Michael H. Cosh, Todd G. Caldwell, C. Bruce Baker, John D. Bolten, Nathan Edwards, Peter Goble, Heather Hofman, Tyson E. Ochsner, Steven Quiring, Charles Schalk, Marina Skumanich, Mark D. Svoboda, Mary E. Woloszyn

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Soil moisture is a critical land surface variable, affecting a wide variety of climatological, agricultural, and hydrological processes. Determining the current soil moisture status is possible via a variety of methods, including in situ monitoring, remote sensing, and numerical modeling. Although all of these approaches are rapidly evolving, there is no cohesive strategy or framework to integrate these diverse information sources to develop and disseminate coordinated national soil moisture products that will improve our ability to understand climate variability. The National Coordinated Soil Moisture Monitoring Network initiative has developed a national strategy for network coordination with NOAA’s National Integrated Drought …

Evaluation Of Remotely Sensed Precipitation Estimates From The Nasa Power Project For Drought Detection Over Jordan, Muhammad Rasool Al‑Kilani, Michel Rahbeh, Jawad Al‑Bakri, Tsegaye Tadesse, Cody Knutson

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Droughts can cause devastating impacts on water and land resources and therefore monitoring these events forms an integral part of planning. The most common approach for detecting drought events and assessing their intensity is use of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which requires abundant precipitation records at good spatial distribution. This may restrict SPI usage in many regions around the world, particularly in areas with limited numbers of ground meteorological stations. Therefore, the use of remotely sensed derived data of precipitation can contribute to drought monitoring. In this study, remotely sensed precipitation estimates from the POWER/Agroclimatology archive of NASA and …

A Model-Based Exploratory Study Of Sulfur Dioxide Dispersions From Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations In The Southeastern United States, Jesse Winchester, Rezaul Mahmood, William Rodgers, Philip J. Silva, Nanh Lovanh, Joshua D. Durkee, John Loughrin

High Plains Regional Climate Center: Staff Publications

In the Southeastern U. S. there are Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) that emit a variety of gases, including SO₂. Sulfur is emitted as reduced sulfur compounds and can react in the atmosphere to produce SO₂. It is expected that the concentra­tion and spread of SO₂ emissions from these sources would differ between wet and dry periods. In this research, SO₂ emissions from locations representing CAFOs and its dispersion over the south­eastern U.S. were simulated through sensitivity experiments using the Weather Research and Forecasting-Chemistry (WRF- Chem) model. Simulations were performed for dry periods and …

The Quantitative Assessment Of Pond Scum: An Examination Of The Biogeochemistry Of Phosphorus Cycling In The Belgrade Lakes, Abbey M. Sykes

Honors Theses

The internal recycling phosphorus in freshwater lake bottom sediments represents a significant source of hypolimnetic phosphorus (P) release for many of Maine’s lakes. In summer months, Maine lakes often thermally stratify and the lake hypolimnion develops anoxia, leading to a reduction in redox potential at the sediment-water interface. These reducing conditions facilitate the reductive dissolution of ferric iron, and, since phosphorus is often present in freshwater lake sediments as solid FeOOH-PO₄ complexes, results in release of soluble phosphorus into the water column. Our current study presents field and laboratory data from sediment fractionation extractions designed to quantify concentrations of …

Heat Stress During Larval Stages On Coral Survivorship For M. Capitata, Sarah Woo

Pitzer Senior Theses

Very little is known about how heat stress during larvae stages effect larvae survivorship, early coral recruit settlement, and later stage coral survivorship. We focused on determining how heat stress during larvae stages effected Montipora capitata survivorship over time. After thermally stressing larvae, we asked how many larvae survived the treatment, how the treatment affected settlement, how many larvae survived the heat treatment but did not settle, and later stage coral survivorship experienced residual effects from the heat stress treatment. We exposed coral larvae to ambient seawater temperatures at 30°C and heated seawater temperatures to 34°C for an hour and …

Pesticide Occurrence And Persistence Entering Recreational Lakes In Watersheds Of Varying Land Uses, Jessica Satiroff, Tiffany Messer, Aaron R. Mittelstet, Daniel D. Snow

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

Currently little is known of newer pesticide classes and their occurrence and persistence in recreational lakes. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to (1) assess average pesticide concentrations and loadings entering recreational lakes in three mixed land use watersheds throughout the growing season, (2) evaluate pesticide persistence longitudinally within the lakes, and (3) perform an ecotoxicity assessment. Six sampling campaigns were conducted at three lakes from April through October 2018 to measure the occurrence and persistence during pre, middle, and post growing season. Polar organic chemical integrative samplers (POCIS) were placed in streams near lake inlets and monthly samples …

Occurrence Of Arsenite In Surface And Groundwater Associated With A Perennial Stream Located In Western Nebraska, Usa, Arindam Malakar, Rajesh Singh, Jeffrey Westrop, Karrie A. Weber, Christopher N. Elofson, Manish Kumar, Daniel D. Snow

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

Dissolved arsenic typically results from chemical weathering of arsenic rich sediments and is most often found in oxidized forms in surface water. The mobility of arsenic is controlled by its valence state and also by its association with iron oxides minerals, the forms of which are both influenced by abiotic and biotic processes in aqueous environment. In this study, speciation methods were used to measure and confirm the presence of reduced arsenic species in the surface water of Frenchman creek, a gaining stream that crosses the Colorado- Nebraska border. Selective extraction analysis of aquifer and stream bed sediments shows that …

Droughtscape, Winter 2021, National Drought Mitigation Center

DroughtScape: Quarterly Newsletter of the National Drought Mitigation Center (2007–2023)

DroughtScape, Winter 2021

Carbonaceous Matter In The Atmosphere And Glaciers Of The Himalayas And The Tibetan Plateau: An Investigative Review, Chaoliu Li, Fangping Yan, Shichang Kang, Caiqing Yan, Zhaofu Hu, Pengfei Chen, Shaopeng Gao, Chao Zhang, Cenlin He, Susan Kaspari, Aron Stubbins

Geological Sciences Faculty Scholarship

Carbonaceous matter, including organic carbon (OC) and black carbon (BC), is an important climate forcing agent and contributes to glacier retreat in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau (HTP). The HTP – the so-called “Third Pole” – contains the most extensive glacial area outside of the polar regions. Considerable research on carbonaceous matter in the HTP has been conducted, although this research has been challenging due to the complex terrain and strong spatiotemporal heterogeneity of carbonaceous matter in the HTP. A comprehensive investigation of published atmospheric and snow data for HTP carbonaceous matter concentration, deposition and light absorption is presented, …

Variation In Coral Thermotolerance Across A Pollution Gradient Erodes As Coral Symbionts Shift To More Heat-Tolerant Genera, Melissa S. Naugle, Thomas A. Oliver, Daniel J. Barshis, Ruth D. Gates, Cheryl A. Logan

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

Phenotypic plasticity is one mechanism whereby species may cope with stressful environmental changes associated with climate change. Reef building corals present a good model for studying phenotypic plasticity because they have experienced rapid climate-driven declines in recent decades (within a single generation of many corals), often with differential survival among individuals during heat stress. Underlying differences in thermotolerance may be driven by differences in baseline levels of environmental stress, including pollution stress. To examine this possibility, acute heat stress experiments were conducted on Acropora hyacinthus from 10 sites around Tutuila, American Samoa with differing nutrient pollution impact. A threshold-based heat …

Experiential Learning In Soil Science: Evaluating Soil Quality In South Wollo, Ethiopia, Melissa Allen, Martha Mamo, Shimelis Beyene, Teshome Regassa, Gandura O. Abagandura, Solomon Abreha, Anthony James Mucia, Tsegaye Tadesse

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

This study abroad program provided an opportunity to enhance the international experience and research skills of University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) students within a multidisciplinary team’s research-education goal on improving food security in Ethiopia. The experiential study component of the project included preparatory sessions during the Fall 2015 Semester at the UNL followed by a four- to five-week fieldwork experience in Ethiopia. Teams from the UNL and an Ethiopian university participated in survey data collection and field soil evaluations from farms in the Gerado area of South Wollo, Ethiopia. Having students interact with farmers increased student self-confidence and enhanced their leadership …

Temperature Variance Portends And Indicates The Extent Of Abrupt Climate Shifts, Christine Ramadhin, Chuixiang Yi, George Hendrey

Publications and Research

Here, we show a discernable increase in temperature variance before a glacial termination by both the Ansari-Bradley test and the moving variance methods plus introduce the idea that there is a correlation between the peak variance and peak temperature increase. The behavior of temperature variance shows potential as a useful tool in analyzing time series data of Earth systems to assess the risk and extent of an upcoming abrupt climate transition.

Time Lags: Insights From The U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network, Edward B. Rastetter, Mark D. Ohman, Katherine J. Elliott, J. S. Rehage, Victor H. Rivera-Monroy, R. E. Boucek, Edward Castañeda-Moya, Tess M. Danielson, Laura Gough, Peter M. Groffman, C. Rhett Jackson, Chelcy Ford Miniat, Gaius R. Shaver

Advanced Science Research Center

Ecosystems across the United States are changing in complex ways that are difficult to predict. Coordinated long-term research and analysis are required to assess how these changes will affect a diverse array of ecosystem services. This paper is part of a series that is a product of a synthesis effort of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. This effort revealed that each LTER site had at least one compelling scientific case study about “what their site would look like” in 50 or 100 yr. As the site results were prepared, themes emerged, and the case …

Cascading Effects: Insights From The U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network, Christie A. Bahlai, Clarisse Hart, Maria T. Kavanaugh, Jeffrey D. White, Roger W. Ruess, Todd J. Brinkman, Hugh W. Ducklow, David R. Foster, William R. Fraser, Hélène Genet, Peter M. Groffman, Stephen K. Hamilton, Jill F. Johnstone, Knut Kielland, Douglas A. Landis, Michelle C. Mack, Orlando Sarnelle, Jonathan R. Thompson

Advanced Science Research Center

Ecosystems across the United States are changing in complex and unpredictable ways and analysis of these changes requires coordinated, long-term research. This paper is a product of a synthesis effort of the U.S. National Science Foundation funded Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network addressing the LTER core research area of “populations and communities.” This analysis revealed that each LTER site had at least one compelling “story” about what their site would look like in 50–100 yr. As the stories were prepared, themes emerged, and the stories were group into papers along five themes: state change, connectivity, resilience, time lags, and cascading …

Katanning Research Facility Carbon Footprint Assessment And Strategy To Achieve Carbon Neutrality By 2030, Stephen Wiedemann, Kristina Duff, Mandy Curnow, Perry J. Dolling, David Bicknell, Paul Sanford, John P. Collins, Gavin D'Adhemar

Climate Science Published Reports

As part of the Western Australian Government’s commitment to emissions reduction and the sustainable mitigation of climate change, the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) identified that the Katanning Research Facility (KRF) is a significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter and that the site provides an opportunity to improve our understanding of emissions arising from agriculture, particularly livestock production. This report presents a baseline organisational carbon footprint assessment and a sustainable emissions reduction strategy with the goal of achieving carbon neutrality for the research facility by 2030.

KRF, with its intensive animal facilities and commercial farm setup, is the …

Building An Improved Drought Climatology Using Updated Drought Tools: A New Mexico Food-Energy-Water (Few) Systems Focus, Lindsay E. Johnson, Hatim M.E. Geli, Michael J. Hayes, Kelly Helm Smith

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Drought is a familiar climatic phenomenon in the United States Southwest, with complex human-environment interactions that extend beyond just the physical drought events. Due to continued climate variability and change, droughts are expected to become more frequent and/or severe in the future. Decision-makers are charged with mitigating and adapting to these more extreme conditions and to do that they need to understand the specific impacts drought has on regional and local scales, and how these impacts compare to historical conditions. Tremendous progress in drought monitoring strategies has occurred over the past several decades, with more tools providing greater spatial and …

Developing A Tourism Opportunity Index Regarding The Prospective Of Overtourism In Nepal, Susan Phuyal

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This research explores Nepal's overtourism scenario based on the capacity of a locality to manage sustainable tourism practices. Environmental degradation, local infrastructure degradation, negative tourist experience and local resident responses regarding visitors are the four main variables used in this study to analyze overtourism. In order to analyze the case study of overtourism, we select the three top touristic cities of Nepal, Kathmandu, Pokhara, and Chitwan based on the number of annual visitors. Nepal's case analysis of overtourism conditions reviews the overall threat of over-tourism and establishes a metric by which tourism can be viewed as potentially detrimental to sustainability. …

Projecting Water Available For Irrigation Use And Identifying Water Supply Stress Under Climate Change Scenarios In Selected U.S. Fruit And Vegetable Production Regions, Andrew Shaw

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change affects water resources differently across geospatial regions in the United States (U.S). There is a concern of how water availability will be affected by changes in long-term temperature and precipitation patterns, specifically in major production regions for eight fruit and vegetable crops. The effects on surface water available for irrigation use and supply stress in five regions containing 31 Agricultural Statistics Districts (ASDs) were assessed. The Water Supply Stress Index Model was used and modified to project water available for irrigation use across nine climate scenarios driven by historical data, five General Circulation Models, two population scenarios, and …

Characterizing El Niño-Southern Oscillation Effects On The Blue Nile Yield And The Nile River Basin Precipitation Using Empirical Mode Decomposition, Justin A. Le, Hesham El-Askary, Mohamed Allali, Eman Sayed, Hani Sweliem, Thomas C. Piechota, Daniele C. Struppa

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Using new mathematical and data-driven techniques, we propose new indices to measure and predict the strength of different El Niño events and how they affect regions like the Nile River Basin (NRB). Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), when applied to Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), yields three Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) tracking recognizable and physically significant non-stationary processes. The aim is to characterize underlying signals driving ENSO as reflected in SOI, and show that those signals also meaningfully affect other physical processes with scientific and predictive utility. In the end, signals are identified which have a strong statistical relationship with various physical …

Effect Of Lockdown On Hcho And Trace Gases Over India During March 2020, Akshansha Chauhan, Ramesh P. Singh

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

COVID-19 is one of the deadly Epidemics that has impacted people living in more than 200 countries. In order to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, India observed total lockdown in the first phase for a period of 21 days (24 March–13 May 2020), so that social distancing is maintained. However, this sudden decision severely affected the normal life of people. The air quality improved due to lockdown, some relaxation was given in different cities and within some areas in the city where the people were not affected by COVID-19. In this paper, we discuss results of detailed analysis of trace …

Forest Drought Response Index (Fordri): A New Combined Model To Monitor Forest Drought In The Eastern United States, Tsegaye Tadesse, David Y. Hollinger, Yared A. Bayissa, Mark Svoboda, Brian Fuchs, Beichen Zhang, Getachew Demissie, Brian D. Wardlow, Gil Bohrer, Kenneth L. Clark, Ankur R. Desai, Lianhong Gu, Asko Noormets, Kimberly A. Novick, Andrew D. Richardson

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Monitoring drought impacts in forest ecosystems is a complex process because forest ecosystems are composed of different species with heterogeneous structural compositions. Even though forest drought status is a key control on the carbon cycle, very few indices exist to monitor and predict forest drought stress. The Forest Drought Indicator (ForDRI) is a new monitoring tool developed by the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) to identify forest drought stress. ForDRI integrates 12 types of data, including satellite, climate, evaporative demand, ground water, and soil moisture, into a single hybrid index to estimate tree stress. The model uses Principal Component Analysis …

Mass And Number Size Distributions Of Rbc In Snow And Firn Samples From Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica, Luciano Marquetto, Susan Kaspari, Jefferson Cardia Simões

Geological Sciences Faculty Scholarship

An extended‐range Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) coupled to a Marin‐5 nebulizer was used to measure the refractory black carbon (rBC) mass and number size distributions in 1,004 samples from a West Antarctica snow/firn core. The SP2 was calibrated using Aquadag and a Centrifugal Particle Mass Analyzer for BC particles ranging from 0.5 to 800 fg. Our results indicate a significant contribution of rare, large particles of mass‐equivalent diameter (D_BC) > 500 nm to the total rBC mass (36%), while small particles (D_BC < 100 nm) are abundant but contribute <8% to total rBC mass. We observed a primary mass median diameter of 162 ± 40 nm, smaller than reported for snow in other regions of the globe but similar to East Antarctica rBC size distributions. In addition, we observed other modes at 673, 1,040, and >1,810 nm (uncontained mode). We compared two sets of samples from different seasons …

Seasonal Grassland Productivity Forecast For The U.S. Great Plains Using Grass-Cast, Melannie D. Hartman, William J. Parton, Justin D. Derner, Darin K. Schulte, William K. Smith, Dannele E. Peck, Ken A. Day, Stephen J. Del Grosso, Susan Lutz, Brian Fuchs, Maosi Chen, Wei Gao

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

Every spring, ranchers in the drought-prone U.S. Great Plains face the same difficult challenge —trying to estimate how much forage will be available for livestock to graze during the upcoming summer grazing season. To reduce this uncertainty in predicting forage availability, we developed an innovative new grassland productivity forecast system, named Grass-Cast, to provide science-informed estimates of growing season aboveground net primary production (ANPP). Grass-Cast uses over 30 yr of historical data including weather and the satellite-derived normalized vegetation difference index (NDVI)—combined with ecosystem modeling and seasonal precipitation forecasts—to predict if rangelands in individual counties are likely to produce below-normal, …

Assessment Of Aerosol Optical Depth Under Background And Polluted Conditions Using Aeronet And Viirs Datasets, Mijin Kim, Seung Hee Kim, Woogyung Vincent Kim, Yun Gon Lee, Jhoon Kim, Menas C. Kafatos

Institute for ECHO Articles and Research

We investigated aerosol optical depth (AOD) under background and polluted conditions using Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) observations. The AOD data were separated into background, high, and median AOD (BAOD, HAOD, and MAOD, respectively) based on the cumulative AOD distribution at each point and then their spatiotemporal variations were analyzed. Persistent pollutant emissions from industrial activity in South Asia (SUA) and Northeast Asia (NEA) produced the highest BAOD values. Gridded-BAODs obtained from VIIRS Deep Blue AOD products showed widespread high-level BAOD over the oceans associated with transport from dust and biomass burning events. The …

A Detailed Assessment Of Groundwater Quality In The Kabul Basin, Afghanistan, And Suitability For Future Development, Hussain Ali Jawadi, Jay Sagin, Daniel D. Snow

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

Kabul is one of the most populated cities in Afghanistan and providing resources to support this population in an arid climate presents a serious environmental challenge. The current study evaluated the quality of local Kabul Basin groundwater to determine its suitability water for drinking and irrigation purposes now and into the future. This aim was aided through groundwater parameter assessment as well as determination ofWater Quality Index (WQI) developed from 15 observation points near the city. The results of our physicochemical analysis illustrate that groundwater in the majority of areas of the Kabul Basin is not generally suitable for human …

A Detailed Assessment Of Groundwater Quality In The Kabul Basin, Afghanistan, And Suitability For Future Development, Hussain Ali Jawadi, Jay Sagin, Daniel D. Snow

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

Abstract: Kabul is one of the most populated cities in Afghanistan and providing resources to support this population in an arid climate presents a serious environmental challenge. The current study evaluated the quality of local Kabul Basin groundwater to determine its suitability water for drinking and irrigation purposes now and into the future. This aim was aided through groundwater parameter assessment as well as determination ofWater Quality Index (WQI) developed from 15 observation points near the city. The results of our physicochemical analysis illustrate that groundwater in the majority of areas of the Kabul Basin is not generally suitable for …