The Climate Program Office congratulations the Drought Assessment Team, which was awarded a Group Silver Medal for Scientific/Engineering Achievement for their work assessing the origins of the 2012 Central Plains Drought.
Annarita Mariotti, Martin Hoerling, Chad McNutt, and Roger Pulwarty who were part of a cross-Line Office team who provided an outstanding scientific assessment of the origins of the 2012 Central Great Plains Drought. The group includes CPO’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections (MAPP) Program and the Drought Task Force.
NOAA’s Drought Task Force aims to achieve significant advances in the ability to monitor, understand, and predict drought over North America. Research results produced by members of the Task Force are expected to help advance official national drought products, the development of early warning systems by the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS), and experimental drought monitoring and prediction activities at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).
NOAA’s Drought Task Force was established in October 2011 with the ambitious goal of achieving significant new advances in the ability to understand, monitor and predict drought over North America. The Task Force (duration is October 2011 – September 2014) is an initiative of MAPP program in partnership with NIDIS.
It brings together over thirty leading MAPP-funded drought scientists from multiple academic and federal institutions (involves scientists from NOAA’s research laboratories and centers, NASA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, NCAR and many universities), in a concerted research effort that builds on individual MAPP research projects. These 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 aimed at testing new drought monitoring and prediction tools for operational and service purposes (as part of NCEP’s Climate Test Bed).
To learn more about the Drought Task Force, please visit MAPP’s Task Force page.