Digital Government: Reviving the Newhall Simulation Model to Understand the Patterns and Trends of Soil Climate Regimes and Drought Events

The agricultural landscapes of Nebraska reflect a complex pattern of soil climate regimes and inherent variability that influence the cropping systems, behavior of farmers, and the health and sustainability of rural communities. The USDA crops and soils databases were coupled with the Enhanced Newhall Simulation Model (ENSM) to explain spatial relationships of soil climate regimes, climatic shifts, crop yields and growing environments, as well as understand patterns, trends, and vulnerability to drought events. In addition, the soil water balance calculations of the ENSM were used to search for El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signatures within the climate histories of long-term weather stations in Nebraska. As part of a drought decision support system, the ENSM illustrates the revival and new application of older nonspatial, deterministic models that can contribute to identifying regions of high climatic variability and shifts through time and space. The Enhanced Newhall Simulation Model was used to derive probabilities of soil climate regimes, the frequency and severity of drought events, and differentiate ecoclimatic boundaries. The ENSM can serve as a risk assessment tool to compare the vulnerabilities of rural communities to drought episodes. A longer-term goal of this project is to discover relationships of ENSO events and their teleconnections (signatures) to climatic variability in Great Plains communities. 1.