UAH secures nearly $1 million to improve drought and water monitoring across the Southeast
Alabama State Climatologist and UAH Associate Professor, Dr. Lee Ellenburg, installs soil-moisture monitoring equipment in the field. Data collected from these sensors will support research into effective precipitation and help evaluate the OpenET product for improved drought assessment and water-resource monitoring across the Southeast.
As brutal temperatures and drought put growing pressure on water supplies and agriculture across the Southeast, researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), have received two federal research awards totaling nearly $1 million to study drought, water availability and agricultural water use across the region. UAH is a part of The University of Alabama System.
The two-year projects, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), are led by Dr. Lee Ellenburg, Alabama State Climatologist and associate professor in UAH’s Department of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences. The Alabama Office of the State Climatologist is housed within UAH’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC).
“Both of these projects are really about improving how we understand and monitor water availability in the Southeast,” Ellenburg says. “We live in a region that receives a lot of rainfall, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that water is available when and where it’s needed. These projects give us an opportunity to better understand our water balance and turn the science into information that can actually support drought, agriculture and water-resource decisions.”
Dr. Lee Ellenburg and UAH researcher Brianne Minton install soil-moisture sensors at a field site.
The NOAA-funded project, Quantifying Effective Precipitation and its Non-stationarity to Improve Drought Assessments in the Southeastern United States, focuses on effective precipitation, or how much rainfall ultimately contributes to water available at or near the land surface rather than being lost through runoff or other processes.
Using hourly rainfall and soil-moisture observations from networks across the Southeast, the research team plans to develop a near-real-time drought indicator called the Standardized Effective Precipitation Index (SPIe) and evaluate how changes in rainfall intensity, frequency and distribution may affect drought assessments over time.
A major question for the team is how much rain from an individual storm actually remains available in the soil. “A large storm may produce several inches of rain, but if much of that water runs off instead of being stored in the soil, it may not provide the drought relief that the rainfall total suggests,” Ellenburg says.
By better accounting for effective precipitation, the team hopes the new approach can provide additional information about conditions on the ground and complement existing drought-monitoring tools.
The NOAA project also includes plans to establish a Southeastern Drought Working Group of state climate offices and regional drought practitioners. The group will provide input as the methodology and product are developed and evaluated. The team also plans to make the resulting information available through established drought platforms, including the Southern Regional Climate Center’s Integrated Water Portal and Drought.gov.
A separate USGS-funded project will evaluate OpenET, a system that uses satellite observations and scientific models to estimate evapotranspiration, or water moving from the land and vegetation back into the atmosphere. Ellenburg leads the project along with UAH researcher Vikalp Mishra in partnership with USGS and OpenET.
“Evapotranspiration is one of the most important, and hardest to observe, parts of the water cycle,” Ellenburg notes. “OpenET gives us an exciting new way to estimate it at very high spatial resolution. This project will allow us to evaluate how well those estimates work in the humid Southeast and then explore how we can use them for practical problems like drought monitoring, irrigation demand and agricultural water management.”
The team plans to evaluate how well OpenET estimates represent conditions by comparing the data with other observations and models.
“A key part of this work is understanding the strengths and limitations of OpenET in a region with a very different climate and landscape than many of the areas where these tools have been studied,” Co-Investigator Mishra says. “By comparing the estimates with observations on the ground, we can better understand where the data performs well and how it can be most effectively used to support water management decisions in the Southeast.”
Although the two projects use different approaches, both center on understanding what happens to water after it reaches the landscape. One examines how much rainfall is retained, while the other looks at water leaving the soil through evaporation. Together, the projects build on UAH’s research in drought, hydrology and applied climate science, with Ellenburg and the UAH team working to develop information that can support drought monitoring, agriculture and water-resource decisions across the Southeast.