Monitoring drought with the U.S. climate reference network

The primary mission of the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) is to measure temperature and precipitation change over the continental U.S. during the next 50 years. The establishment of this infrastructure, however, provides opportunities for other climate measurements of high quality to be made coincident with the primary measurements. In 2009, high-quality soil moisture and soil temperature observing instruments were installed at USCRN sites across the Southeast and Midwest, with the rest of the country being installed over the next two years in a program funded through the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Program. This marks the establishment of the nation's first soil moisture / soil temperature network with triplicate measurements at each site. Instruments are installed in three locations within five meters of the site tower, providing three independent samples of soil moisture and soil temperature measured at 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 cm.

The progress of this program will be discussed, and some preliminary analyses of this new data source will be shown, including comparisons between soil moisture observations and U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) determinations at a number of stations. The utility of these data for guiding authors of the USDM is considerable, with some caveats regarding the sparseness of the network and the lack of climatology. Methods for visualizing the raw data for drought monitoring purposes will be examined, and plans for products to be served through the NIDIS-sponsored U.S. Drought Portal will be discussed.