Application of a Land Surface Model for Drought Monitoring and Prediction in Washington State

Abstract

Shukla will provide an introduction to drought modeling. There have been 20 major drought events since 1900. This provided the motivation to develop objective measures of climate and hydrology to help characterize and predict drought in Washington State. He will discuss the issues surrounding current drought assessment, and review the methodology of the current model. He will explain the UW Drought Monitoring System, including performance evaluation. This system is available at: http://www.hydro.washington.edu/forecast/sarp/. Finally, he will provide an overview of future directions in drought models, including a focus on communication of model-based drought information.