Scientists have predicted that droughts and floods will become more frequent and severe as our planet warms and climate changes, but detecting this on regional and continental scales has proven difficult. Now a new UMD and NASA study confirms that major droughts and pluvials – periods of excessive precipitation and water storage on land – have indeed been occurring more often.
Kimberly Slinski can’t stop droughts from happening, but she can see them coming. Her warnings help entire regions of the world prepare for water shortages, crop failures and food insecurities that follow severe droughts. As an assistant research scientist in the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, Slinski uses satellite data to monitor water availability in drought-prone regions around the world.
ESSIC Researcher Kimberly Slinski is the Principal Investigator on “Earth Observation-Based Monitoring and Forecasting of Rangeland Water Resources”, a newly funded project that aims to develop new capabilities for monitoring and forecasting water availability in African rangeland ponds. The project team includes Shrad Shukla and Chris Funk of the University of California Santa Barbara, Mike Jasinski of NASA GSFC, and Gabriel Senay of USGS.
ESSIC scientist Weston Anderson is a co-author on a new paper out in Nature Climate Change titled “Enhanced risk of concurrent regional droughts with increased ENSO variability and warming”.
(SACRAMENTO, CA — October 21, 2021) OpenET, a new online platform that uses satellites to estimate water consumed by crops and other plants, launched today, making critical data for water management widely available in 17 western states for the first time amid record drought.
ESSIC scientist Weston Anderson is lead-author on a new paper that suggests that African food insecurity is being driven by an uptick in violent conflict. In the study published in Nature Food, Anderson worked with researchers from Columbia University, New York University, and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.
ESSIC/CISESS scientists Li Fang, Jifu Yin, Mitchell Schull, and Jicheng Liu collaborated on a chapter in Global Drought and Flood: Observation, Modeling, and Prediction titled “Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration for Global Drought Monitoring”.
CISESS Deputy Director E. Hugo Berbery has a new article published on May 17th in the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences titled “Characteristics of droughts in Argentina’s Core Crop Region”.
L. Gwen Chen, ESSIC/CISESS Assistant Research Engineer, is first author on a new paper in Atmosphere about flash drought prediction.
ESSIC Assistant Research Professor Thomas Wild has a new article in the Journal of Hydrology titled “100 years of data is not enough to establish reliable drought thresholds”. Wild’s co-authors include Robert Link, Abigail Snyder, Mohamad Hejazi, and Chris Vernon from the Joint Global Change Research Institute.
