Using Seasonal Prediction to Improve Decision-making in Drought Monitoring

In the drought monitoring community, there is a growing demand for information that can help users (such as water resource managers or agricultural producers) make a decision based on possible future conditions. Users of the community rely on various sources, including scientifically based products that might not provide enough local detail (the NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal outlooks) and non-science based sources with more detail (Farmer’s Almanac). Despite recent advances in sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction, forecast skill for this particularly challenging timescale remains relatively low. Currently, communication of possible future conditions is the most important piece of a decision-making tool to help these users. In this presentation, I will share several examples of products in development that communicate future climate conditions in useful and useable ways. One product is the precipitation projection tool. This tool shows how precipitation has accumulated for the water year and then projects historical precipitation accumulations from the current date forward. This helps users visualize how likely it is for a location to make up any precipitation deficits, what the likelihood is that water year precipitation will be average, and a range of most probable accumulations. In the figure example, 2018 precipitation projections for Cortez, CO showed a very low probability of near normal precipitation by the end of the water year. With the products presented, probabilistic and uncertainty information is key, and users would have the capability of making more informed decisions by assessing the risk of occurrence of certain events.