Research on the forcing of drought and pluvial events over North America is dominated by general circulation model experiments that often have operational limitations (e.g., computational expense, ability to simulate relevant processes, etc). We use a statistically based modeling approach to investigate sea surface temperature (SST) forcing of the twentieth century pluvial (1905–1917) and droug...

Fossil fuel emissions aside, temperate North America is a net sink of carbon dioxide at present1–3. Year-to-year variations in this carbon sink are linked to variations in hydroclimate that affect net ecosystem productivity3,4. The severity and incidence of climatic extremes, including drought, have increased as a result of climate warming5–8. Here, we examine the effect of the turn of the cent...

Agriculture is inherently risky. Drought is a particularly troublesome hazard that has a documented adverse impact on agricultural development. A long history of decision-support tools have been developed to try and help farmers or policy makers manage risk. We offer site-specific drought insurance methodology as a significant addition to this process. Drought insurance works by encapsulating t...

The authors present a method for analyzing the economic benefits to the United States resulting from changes in drought frequency and severity due to global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. The method begins by constructing reduced-formmodels of the effect of drought on agriculture and reservoir recreation in the contiguous United States. These relationships are then applied to drought projecti...

This article presents projected future drought occurrences in five river basins in Virginia. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate models were used to derive input variables of multiple drought indices, such as the Standardized Soil Moisture index (SSI), the Multivariate Standardized Drought Index (MSDI), and the Modified...

The National Agricultural Decision Support System (NADSS) is a web based geospatial decision support system used to aid producers and decision makers in analyzing and effectively mitigating the effects of drought. The NADSS application is unique in its implementation, containing web-based implementations of commonly utilized drought indices including the Newhall Simulation Model (NSM), Palmer D...

The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) has been used for more than 30 years to quantify the long-term drought conditions for a given location and time. However, a common critique of the PDSI is that the behavior of the index at various locations is inconsistent, making spatial comparisons of PDSI values difficult, if not meaningless. A self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index (SC-PDSI) ...

The high-yield varieties ‘Banks’ and ‘Cybonnet’, released to seed growers during 2004, contain the Pi-ta R gene used in blast-resistant varieties for over 16 years. While Cybonnet fields were blast free, severe blast disease developed in drought-stressed Banks growing in a sandy production field in Clay County during 2004 and then again in sandy fields throughout Arkansas during 2005 and 2006. ...

– 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 ...