Disentangling Complex Interactions and Feedbacks Among Droughts, Fires, and Snowpack in the Western U.S. by Integrating Observations and Models
This project’s goal is to quantify the complex interactions and feedbacks between droughts, fires, and snowpack in the western U.S. by integrating observations and models. This will help improve predictions and projections of drought characteristics and impacts.
Droughts have significant impacts on climate and human systems, causing substantial damages to the environment and socio-economic development. Snowpack and fires, two key elements affecting hydroclimatic and socio-economic systems, can interact with and feed back to droughts in complicated ways, particularly in the western U.S. For example, observations (e.g., Abatzoglou and Kolden, 2013) have shown strong correlations between burned area and drought index, snow water equivalent, and soil moisture over the Rocky Mountains in the past decades.
Moreover, western U.S. droughts have become more frequent and this trend is expected to continue, along with increasing fires and declining snowpack. However, our current understanding of the interactions and feedbacks among droughts, fires, and snowpack is still very limited, which hinders accurate predictions and projections of U.S. droughts and related hydroclimatic and socio-economic effects.
This project will address three key scientific questions and tasks:
- What are the quantitative characteristics and relationships of droughts, fires, and snowpack evolution in the western U.S. based on observations?
- How well do state-of-the-art models capture the characteristics and relationships of droughts, fires, and snowpack evolution in the western U.S.?
- What are the mechanisms for drought-fire-snowpack interactions and feedback in the western U.S.?
This project is part of the MAPP/NIDIS supported Drought Task Force IV.
For more information, please contact Amanda Sheffield (amanda.sheffield@noaa.gov) and Marina Skumanich (marina.skumanich@noaa.gov).
Research Snapshot
What to expect from this research
- Peer-reviewed publications describing study results, as well as presentations to the scientific community, including:
- Tang, Wenfu, Cenlin He, Louisa Emmons, and Junzhe Zhang. 2024. "Global expansion of Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) and WUI fires: Insights from a multiyear Worldwide Unified Database (WUWUI)." Environmental Research Letters, March 8, 2024.
- Abolafia-Rosenzweig, Ronnie, Cenlin He, and Fei Chen. 2022. "Winter and spring climate explains a large portion of interannual variability and trend in western U.S. summer fire burned area." Environmental Research Letters 17(5), April 29, 2022.
- Improved understanding of interactions and feedback among droughts, fires, and snowpack in the western U.S.
- Enhanced version of the community Noah-MP land surface model coupled with WRF-chem that is able to capture the key interactions among droughts, fires, and snowpack processes. Descriptions of the new model capabilities will be added to the existing technical documentation publicly available online
- A drought prediction model based on observations and machine learning tools for future application and advancement in drought monitoring, warning, and prediction systems.
