92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Sunday, 22 January 2012
Drought Forecast in Northeast Arkansas
Hall E (New Orleans Convention Center )
Edith L. Martinez, McNair Achievement Program Researcher, Jonesboro, AR

Drought is a prolonged period of low precipitation. The moisture deficit during drought is injurious to crops. Arkansas is an agricultural state, and a prolonged drought period will bring losses not only to the farmers but to the whole state economy system. This research is based on northeast Arkansas, climate division 3. A similar research has been done in South Carolina where drought was predicted by using a conditional residual resampling technique. In that research, stochastic approaches for estimating uncertainty were applied to drought index predictions. Similarly, drought indices and climate information is being used in this research. The data range from 1951 to 2009, and it is to be divided into two sets, 1951 to 1980 and 1981 to 2009. The division must be made for more accurate results in the correlations to be calculated. The correlations between the climate information are to be found to decide which specific indices are to be used to predict drought. The data is to be obtained from USGS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The expected outcome is the prediction of drought in the desired area in Arkansas for the coming years.

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