TY - JOUR
T1 - Convective suppression before and during the United States Northern Great Plains flash drought of 2017
AU - Gerken, Tobias
AU - Bromley, Gabriel T.
AU - Ruddell, Benjamin L.
AU - Williams, Skylar
AU - Stoy, Paul C.
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Integrated Activities (OIA) 1632810, the NSF Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) 1552976, the US Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) Hatch project 228396, the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, and The Graduate School at Montana State University. BLR acknowledges support from NSF Emerging Frontiers (EF) 1241960. We thank Larry Oolman for maintaining the Upper Air Sounding Archive at the University of Wyoming. The US Drought Monitor (USDM) is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (NDMC-UNL), the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Map information courtesy of NDMC-UNL. We thank Tanja Fransen (National Weather Service Forecast Office Glasgow, MT) as well as Buddhi Achhami, Adam Cook, Hannah Goemann, Audrey Harvey, and Jim Junker (Montana State University) for helpful comments on a draft version of this manuscript. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. We acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Integrated Activities (OIA) 1632810, the NSF Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) 1552976, the US Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) Hatch project 228396, the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, and The Graduate School at Montana State University. BLR acknowledges support from NSF Emerging Frontiers (EF) 1241960. We thank Larry Oolman for maintaining the Upper Air Sounding Archive at the University of Wyoming. The US Drought Monitor (USDM) is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (NDMC-UNL), the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Map information courtesy of NDMC-UNL. We thank Tanja Fransen (National Weather Service Forecast Office Glasgow, MT) as well as Buddhi Achhami, Adam Cook, Hannah Goemann, Audrey Harvey, and Jim Junker (Montana State University) for helpful comments on a draft version of this manuscript. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Author(s).
PY - 2018/8/7
Y1 - 2018/8/7
N2 - Flash droughts tend to be disproportionately destructive because they intensify rapidly and are difficult to prepare for. We demonstrate that the 2017 US Northern Great Plains (NGP) flash drought was preceded by a breakdown of land-atmosphere coupling. Severe drought conditions in the NGP were first identified by drought monitors in late May 2017 and rapidly progressed to exceptional drought in July. The likelihood of convective precipitation in May 2017 in northeastern Montana, however, resembled that of a typical August when rain is unlikely. Based on the lower tropospheric humidity index (HIlow), convective rain was suppressed by the atmosphere on nearly 50% of days during March in NE Montana and central North Dakota, compared to 30% during a normal year. Micrometeorological variables, including potential evapotranspiration (ETp), were neither anomalously high nor low before the onset of drought. Incorporating convective likelihood to drought forecasts would have noted that convective precipitation in the NGP was anomalously unlikely during the early growing season of 2017. It may therefore be useful to do so in regions that rely on convective precipitation.
AB - Flash droughts tend to be disproportionately destructive because they intensify rapidly and are difficult to prepare for. We demonstrate that the 2017 US Northern Great Plains (NGP) flash drought was preceded by a breakdown of land-atmosphere coupling. Severe drought conditions in the NGP were first identified by drought monitors in late May 2017 and rapidly progressed to exceptional drought in July. The likelihood of convective precipitation in May 2017 in northeastern Montana, however, resembled that of a typical August when rain is unlikely. Based on the lower tropospheric humidity index (HIlow), convective rain was suppressed by the atmosphere on nearly 50% of days during March in NE Montana and central North Dakota, compared to 30% during a normal year. Micrometeorological variables, including potential evapotranspiration (ETp), were neither anomalously high nor low before the onset of drought. Incorporating convective likelihood to drought forecasts would have noted that convective precipitation in the NGP was anomalously unlikely during the early growing season of 2017. It may therefore be useful to do so in regions that rely on convective precipitation.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85051271733&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85051271733&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5194/hess-22-4155-2018
DO - 10.5194/hess-22-4155-2018
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85051271733
SN - 1027-5606
VL - 22
SP - 4155
EP - 4163
JO - Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
JF - Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
IS - 8
ER -