Drought Outlooks

Drought conditions can be critical to weather-sensitive operations. Dave Miskus and his team at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center compile statistics, forecasts, and expert input into drought outlook maps that describe likely future drought conditions for the coming one-month and three-month time periods.

For the monthly outlooks, farmers would love to know whether or not there’s going to be adequate rain during the growing season... whether its going to be dry... whether they should plant certain crops... whether they should irrigate. For the seasonal outlooks, again that helps the water managers to determine whether their reservoirs are going to be filling or being depleted and then they have to worry about future levels months and even maybe years down the road.

There are four drought categories. Drought is usually slow to begin and slow to end, so by nature drought outlooks include large areas designated with the term “persistence”. These are areas where an official drought category will likely remain the same or worsen. If an area is likely to have its designation downgraded but remain in an official drought category, its label is “improvement.” Drought “removal” represents areas likely to be declassified as being in an official drought category. The fourth and final map category indicates areas where experts agree drought will likely “develop.” Each category refers to likely conditions at the end of the time period for the map. For a one-month outlook, the category on the map refers to conditions at the end of that month. For a three-month outlook, the category looks ahead more than 90 days.

The outlook builds on the United States Drought Monitor, which evaluates current conditions.

The Drought Outlook focuses on the future. The outlook starts with drought areas from the most recent Drought Monitor map. To look ahead, scientists around the country evaluate the current 1- and 3-month temperature and precipitation outlooks to consider how drought might evolve.

The most powerful climate indicator for worsening or improving drought is the state of the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillaiton, or ENSO. ENSO is an example of a teleconnection-- a climate pattern that can influence conditions over large areas in both the short-and long-term.

A written summary accompanies each map and provides condensed information on the national scale and detailed information on the regional level.

People want to know whether the drought outlooks are useful, and we call that skill.

What we do is take the drought outlooks and verify it against the drought monitor and produce a third product that shows whether there’s some skill in those various areas we predicted for.

So these three maps are side by side-by-side, and overall we are doing a very good job with both forecasts. Climate Prediction Center Drought Outlooks deliver actionable information that managers use every month.