Weather and climate events and agronomic enterprise are coupled via crop phenology and yield, which is temperature and precipitation dependent. Additional coupling between weather and climate and agronomic enterprise occurs through agricultural practices such as tillage, irrigation, erosion, livestock management, and forage. Thus, the relationship between precipitation, temperature, and yield i...

In the current human-influenced era, drought is initiated by natural and human drivers, and human activities are as integral to drought as meteorological factors. In large irrigated agricultural regions with high levels of human intervention, where the natural farmland soil moisture has usually been changed significantly by high-frequency irrigation, the actual severity of agricultural drought ...

Drought is the dominant process of crop loss nationally and within Nebraska. Nearly twothirds of the 18.6 million harvested acres are covered by crop insurance (USDA/RMA, 2003; USDA/NASS, 2003). For the most part, Nebraska’s crop losses range from $50 to 75 million in non-drought years, but the losses approach nearly $200 million in drought years, such as 2000. The past growing season (2002) cr...

Introduction ‘Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it’, said Mark Twain. But this famous quote is decidedly inaccurate: people have long contemplated weather modification, and both adapt or adjust to weather conditions, and move towards or away from certain climatic regimes. Southern Africa generally has a high coefficient of rainfall variation, making droughts a fr...

The Central Valley of California is one of the most productive agricultural locations in the world, which is made possible by a complex and vast irrigation system. Beginning in 2012, California endured one of the worst droughts in its history. Local impacts of the drought have been evaluated, but it is not yet well understood how the drought reverberated through the global food system. Here we ...

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...

Twenty-three stream sites representing a range of forested, agricultural, and urban land uses were sampled in the South Platte River Basin of Colorado from July through September 2002 to characterize water quality during drought conditions. With a few exceptions, dissolved ammonia, Kjeldahl nitrogen, total phosphorus, and dissolved orthophosphate concentrations were similar to seasonal historic...

By J. ARTHUR HARRIS, Head, Department of Botany, University of Minnesota, and Collaborator, Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department ofAgriculture; W. F. HOFFMAN, Assistant Professor of Agricultural Biochemistry, University of Minnesota, formerly {1920-1924) Field Assistant, Alkali and Drought Resistant Plant Investigations, and Biophysical Investigations, Bureau of Plant Industry, Un...

Agricultural drought is considered to be one of the man’s worst natural enemy. Its beginning is subtle, its progress is insidious and its effect can be devastating. In a country like India, drought is considered to be a major factor of uncertainty due to vagarious of monsoon. Once there was not effective drought assessment and monitoring system, but now remote sensing plays an important role an...

A new index for agricultural drought monitoring is presented based on the integration of different soil/vegetation remote sensing observations. The synergistic fusion of the surface soil moisture (SSM) from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) derived land surface temperature (LST), and water/vegetation indices for a...