Pancontinental droughts in North America, or droughts that simultaneously affect a large percentage of the geographically and climatically distinct regions of the continent, present significant on-the-ground management challenges and, as such, are an important target for scientific research. The methodology of paleoclimate-model data comparisons is used herein to provide a more comprehensive un...

Recently the Southwest has experienced a spate of dryness, which presents a challenge to the sustainability of current water use by human and natural systems in the region. In the Colorado River Basin, the early 21st century drought has been the most extreme in over a century of Colorado River flows, and might occur in any given century with probability of only 60%. However, hydrological model ...

The causes of persistent droughts and wet periods, or pluvials, over western North America are examined in model simulations of the period from 1856 to 2000. The simulations used either (i) global sea surface temperature data as a lower boundary condition or (ii) observed data in just the tropical Pacific and computed the surface ocean temperature elsewhere with a simple ocean model. With both ...

Geophysical and sedimentary records from five lakes in Massachusetts reveal regionally coherent hydrologic variability during the Holocene. All of the lakes have risen since ~9.0 ka, but multicentury droughts after 5.6 ka repeatedly lowered their water levels. Quantified water level histories from the three best-studied lakes share >70% of their reconstructed variance. Four prominent low-water ...

[1] Severe droughts developed in theWest and Southeast of the U.S. starting early in 2007. The development of the droughts is well monitored and predicted by our model-based Drought Monitoring and Prediction System (DMAPS). Using the North America Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) realtime meteorological forcing and the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) land surface model, DMAPS is capab...

In this study, the temporal and spatial variations of groundwater drought using a Standardized Groundwater Level Index (SGI) were analyzed based on 40 monthly groundwater level observation wells from 1989 to 2012 in Jiangsu Province, China. Meteorological drought, calculated by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), was also included to reveal its propagation and impact on the groundwater ...

Drought is an inevitable part of the world’s climate. It occurs in wet as well as in dry regions. Therefore, planning for drought and mitigating its impacts is essential. In this study, a hedging rule is developed using the zero/one mixed integer-programming approach. Furthermore, some procedures are introduced to ease the computational burden inherent in integer programming. Hedging rules are ...

The atmospheric and oceanic causes of North American droughts are examined using observations and ensemble climate simulations. The models indicate that oceanic forcing of annual mean precipitation variability accounts for up to 40% of total variance in northeastern Mexico, the southern Great Plains, and the Gulf Coast states but less than 10% in central and eastern Canada. Observations and mod...

This study examines the change in current 100year hydrological drought frequencies in the Mediterranean in comparison to the 2070s as simulated by the global model WaterGAP. The analysis considers socio-economic and climate changes as indicated by the IPCC scenarios A2 and B2 and the global general circulation model ECHAM4. Under these conditions today’s 100-year drought is estimated to occur 1...

Abstract The use of artificial neural networks as a tool to forecast droughts in Sri Lanka is presented. Predictions were made using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) as the drought monitoring index. Monthly rainfall recorded at 13 climatological stations covering both the wet and dry zones over a long time period have been used as the input to train and test the neural networks. The a...