The series of severe droughts between 2007 and 2012 resulted in substantial decreases in cattle numbers – and enterprises – in our region. Some of the impact of these droughts may have been offset if producers in the region had reliable, drought-resilient summer forages. For all of the benefits of tall fescue, it was never meant to provide our summer forage. After all, it is a coolseason grass....

A qualitative model of smallholder agriculture with a few core variables and two allocation rules for labour and investment in agricultural resources was developed to cover spatial heterogeneity in Northeast Brazil. This region is characterised by large natural and socio-economic variance, recurrent droughts and widespread rural poverty. The resulting system dynamics essentially consists of a c...

In arid countries with long dry seasons and frequent occurrence of droughts, poultry litter is used often as a feedstuff for ruminants (Silanikove & Tiomkin, 1992; Deshck et al., 1998). It sometimes constitutes the main source of nutrients for the animals (Silanikove & Tiomkin, 1992). Similar situations exist in Southern Africa in particular during protracted droughts or when devastating veld f...

Tree-ring data from Virginia indicate that the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island disappeared during the most extreme drought in 800 years (1587-1589) and that the alarming mortality and the near abandonment of Jamestown Colony occurred during the driest 7-year episode in 770 years (1606-1612). These extraordinary droughts can now be implicated in the fate of the Lost Colony and in the appalling dea...

there are different materials and compounds in water that determine its chemical and physical quality. as the result of special conditions such as increase and decrease in discharge, water quality can vary. one of these conditions is drought that decreases discharge, and water quality changes. in this study, droughts of sistan and baluchistan province have been analyzed using standardized preci...

– Use of logarithmic function for drought severity assessment. Due to the multiplicative and cumulative effect of various risk events, the use of logarithmic function can provide satisfactory results in the analysis of risks. Based on the monthly values of climatic parameters from fourteen stations in the eastern part of Romania (1961-2006), the author uses the logarithmic function to evaluate ...

The 132-year historical rainfall record reveals that severe droughts in India have always been accompanied by El Niño events. Yet El Niño events have not always produced severe droughts. We show that El Niño events with the warmest sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific are more effective in focusing drought-producing subsidence over India than events with the...

Southern California and much of the western United States face a chronic challenge of limited water supply due to high potential evaporation and low precipitation coupled with frequent droughts. Mitigation approaches include the use of ground water, reliance on water from river systems fed by mountainous regions that have relatively high precipitation, and the construction of extensive aqueduct...

Droughts can be characterized by their severity, frequency and duration, and areal extent. Depth-area-duration analysis, widely used to characterize precipitation extremes, provides a basis for evaluation of drought severity when storm depth is replaced by an appropriate measure of drought severity. We used gridded precipitation and temperature data to force a physically-based macroscale hydrol...