Agricultural crops can wither in a flash when the days turn hot, the air dries, the rain stops and moisture evaporates quickly from the soil.
The Quick Drought Response Index, or QuickDRI, is a weekly alarm sensitive to early-stage drought conditions and rapidly evolving drought events.
Developed by the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies and the National Drought Mitigation Center, both part of the university’s School of Natural Resources, and in coordination with USGS, the index combines and analyzes four drought indicators – precipitation, soil moisture, vegetation health and evaporative moisture loss from plants — all at once to better “see” drought conditions emerge before traditional drought-monitoring tools.
“Most traditional drought indicators focus on a single environmental characteristic such as soil moisture, whereas QuickDRI represents a collective dryness of variables in a given location,” said Brian Wardlow, QuickDRI project co-lead and director of the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies.
Fire managers with the Bureau of Land Management and other government agencies, along with farmers and rangeland owners, will be able to rely on QuickDRI as periods of hot, dry weather add to vegetation stress.
“Next generation tools like QuickDRI are being developed to help bring better drought early warning capacity to the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor map.” The drought monitor, used by policymakers, media and researchers, has become such an integral part of mapping drought across the United States that it is used in the allocation of USDA Farm Service Agency drought relief.
NOAA ranks drought second in terms of national weather-related economic impacts behind hurricanes, with annual losses nearing $9 billion in the United States.
Though the tool became operational in June, archived maps have been created dating back to January 2000 to provide a resource for assessing abnormal vegetation and climate conditions over a longer historical period.
QuickDRI was funded through a $1.3 million grant from NASA’s Applied Sciences for Water Resources program and had additional support from the USGS Land Remote Sensing Program.
To learn more about QuickDRI, visit http://quickdri.unl.edu or https://vegdri.cr.usgs.gov.