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Advancing drought understanding, monitoring and prediction
Annarita Mariotti
NOAA/OAR Climate Program Office
Siegfried Schubert
NASA/GSFC GMAO
Kingtse Mo
NOAA/NWS Climate Prediction Center
Christa Peters-Lidard
NASA/GSFC Hydrologic Sciences Laboratory
Andy Wood
NOAA NWS/Northwest River Forecast Center
Roger Pulwarty
NOAA/OAR Climate Program Office and ESRL/PSD
Jin Huang
NOAA/NWS Climate Test Bed
Dan Barrie
NOAA/OAR Climate Program Office
Despite recent advances in drought understanding, monitoring and forecasting, current drought capabilities still fall short of users’ needs, especially the need for skillful and reliable drought forecasts at regional and local scales. To tackle this outstanding and challenging problem, NOAA’s Drought Task Force was established in October 2011 as a focused and coordinated research effort drawing from excellence across the broad drought research community, with the ambitious goal of achieving significant new advances in the ability to understand, monitor and predict drought over North America. The NOAA Drought Task Force Meeting (held October 25–26, 2012 in Fort Collins) had the goal to assess work status and advances after the first year of activities, develop future plans and assess near-term research gaps. Highlights of the Drought Task Force meeting and its outcomes are provided in this summary.
Corresponding Author: Dr Annarita Mariotti, NOAA/OAR Climate Program Office, 1315 EastWest Highway, Silver Spring, 20910 MD, Tel: +1 301 734-1237, Annarita.mariotti@noaa.gov