Providing Crop-Specific Flash Drought Information

Evaporative demand, or the effective thirst of the atmosphere for water vapor, has been identified as a key component of drought development. This is especially true of flash droughts. Products such as the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI) have brought evaporative demand to the forefront of the United States' operational drought monitoring process. These data have been proven valuable at national and regional scales, but lose some of utility at field scale as the data are not crop-specific. This poster highlights the Colorado Climate Center and National Integrated Drought Information System's work using the NLDAS Phase-2 model (which powers EDDI) to explore growing season anomalies in evaporative demand with reference to a number of different crop types.