Climate Modeling Project

Description: We usually don't think of droughts in the same way as other natural disasters, such as earthquakes or hurricanes. For example, no one knows for sure how severe a drought will be - until the rains return. But droughts are one of the most costly natural disasters, with complex feedbacks and interactions that impact all aspects of sustainability. Drought is a complex phenomenon that varies spatially and temporally in its context, duration, frequency, severity and impact, and is never the result of a single cause. The challenge here is to develop spatiotemporal analysis techniques to understand and predict drought pattern evolution. These will need to simultaneously access 4-dimensional data on many different drought phenomenon, to discover and quantify spatiotemporal patterns that can be modeled to enable improved drought prediction.