NOAA's Drought Task Force initiatives to advance the understanding, monitoring and prediction of North American drought

The NOAA Drought Task Force was established in October 2011 with the goal of achieving significant new advances in the ability to understand, monitor and predict drought over North America. The Task Force is an initiative of NOAA's Climate Program Office Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) program in partnership with NIDIS. It brings together over thirty-five leading drought scientists, primarily but not exclusively MAPP-funded, from multiple academic and federal institutions. The group is comprised of scientists from research laboratories and/or operational centers from NOAA, other U.S. agencies laboratories and academia. Their concerted research effort builds on individual MAPP research projects and related drought-research sector developments. The projects span the wide spectrum of drought research needed to make fundamental advances, from those aimed at the basic understanding of drought mechanisms to those evaluating new drought monitoring and prediction tools for operational and service purposes.

This contribution will present an overview of Drought Task Force activities to date, including research highlights, a case-study approach to drought understanding that resulted in a comprehensive analysis of the 2012 Central Great Plains drought and the development of a protocol to assess advances in drought monitoring and prediction.