BOARD00047 ‎(2)‎

• Board Meeting Date: 9/20/2006
• Description: IWM & D Section - Western Governors Association - The National Integrated Drought Information System - Creating a Drought Early Warning System for the 21st Century
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

2. Additional federal and nonfederal networks also are vital to the success
of NIDIS. These include those operated by NASA, EPA, USGS,
USDA/NRCS, USDA/Forest Service, DO]'s Bureau of Land
Management, Bureau of Reclamation, state and regional mesonets, .
stale Oood warning systems, etc. The necessary resources (Q maintain
and strengthen their monitoring capabilities and integrate them with
NIDIS are critical.

3. Using the Oklahoma Mesonet as a model, the NIDIS Leadership Team
should explore partnership opportunities with the National Law
Enforcement Telecommunications System INLETS) and the various
state law enforcement telecommunication systems in each state to
transmit real time weather and climate monitoring data

Recommendation 2b: The NIDIS Leadership Team should idenllfy and
evaluate current and historical data sources on climate, water supply and
storage capabilities, and drought indices for their utility and applicability.
NIDIS will be built on the integration of these existing databases, and expanded
to fill information gaps. Tools and programs to fill the current gaps in drought
monitoring may indude the following:

I. Integrating meteorological, climatological, hydrological and agricultural/
vegetation drought assessment tools within the NIDIS infrastructure,
thereby deriving useful information beyond that contained in the
separately maintained databases.

2. Developing new drought assessment tools that provide access to
environmental data and analyses at the appropriate scale (e.g., state,
watershed. county) in a GIS modeling framework.

3. Creating new water resources assessment tools to improve the under-
standing of hydrological drought.

4. Producing tools capable of generating credible short- and long-term
drought forecasts in forms specific 10 user needs and locations.

5. Assembling tools to assimilate both remotely sensed (e.g., satellite,
radar) and in situ instrument-based observations, with emphasis on
techniques to analyze and model the status of drought by integrating
both types of observations.

6. Having the National Drought Mitigation Center, at the University of
Nebraska in Lincoln, be a principal clearinghouse for lools designed 10
address the needs of the drought community.

Recommendation 2c: NIDIS must provide a methodolo&y to accurately and
comprehensively quantify the reporting of drought impacts across all relevant
seclors and scales, through the following actions:

1. Developing a Web-based reporting system to collect quantitative and
qualitative drought impact information for all sectors into J national
database within an interactive GIS modeling framework.

2. Dcveloping tools capable of integrating drought impacts and cllviron-
mental data into fonns useful for mitigation and adaptive management.

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