Seasonal Drought Forecast For the Intermountain West
2023/2024 Winter
Precipitation anomalies (left) and total (right) during Dec - Feb in 2023/2024. Hindcast – or retrospective – NMME forecasts from 1981 - present (Kirtman, Ben P., et al.) were trained using the analog method (Gutmann, Ethan D., et al.), utilizing 4-kilometer PRISM^3 (Daly, Christopher., et al.) data. The analog method identifies historical precipitation patterns that most closely match the forecast for a given month in the testing period.
References
-
Gutmann, Ethan D., et al. En-GARD: A Statistical Downscaling Framework to Produce and Test Large Ensembles of Climate Projections. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 23.10 (2022): 1545-1561. doi:10.1175/JHM-D-21-0142.1.
-
Kirtman, Ben P., et al. The North American multimodel ensemble: phase-1 seasonal-to-interannual prediction; phase-2 toward developing intraseasonal prediction. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 95.4 (2014): 585-601. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00050.1.
-
Daly, Christopher., et al. Physiographically sensitive mapping of climatological temperature and precipitation across the conterminous United States. International Journal of Climatology. 28.15 (2008): 2031-2064. doi:10.1002/joc.1688
This utility has been developed in partnership with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station