Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2019ND200B

Drought identification and prediction for cold climate regions

Institute: North Dakota
Year Established: 2019 Start Date: 2019-05-31 End Date: 2020-05-30
Total Federal Funds: $1,962 Total Non-Federal Funds: $3,924

Principal Investigators:

Project Summary: Drought as a destructive disaster is associated with a great number of socio-economic damages and losses. Thus, identification and prediction of droughts are crucial to mitigation of their impacts. Drought indices are common tools in drought identification. Although many studies have been conducted to develop new indices, more efforts are still needed to develop new indices to achieve more accurate drought identification. In addition to identification, drought prediction is necessary to prevent the high level of damages to the society. Despite the fact that there are many studies related to drought identification, few studies have focused on cold-climate regions. The main objective of this proposed study is to modify the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) in drought prediction based on hydroclimatic data and drought indices in cold climate. Then, the new method will be applied to predict drought in the Red River Basin of the North (RRB), a typical cold climate region. Finally, the root weighted mean square error (RWMSE) will be used to evaluate the model performance. This study will provide valuable drought information especially for the stakeholders and decision makers in North Dakota.