The North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center is a partnership between the US Geological Survey, the University of Colorado Boulder and five consortium partners. The NC CASC fosters innovative and applied research in support of tribal, federal, state, and local natural resource management and decision-making. The North Central center is one of eight regional climate centers in the national CASC network created to help meet the changing needs of land and resource managers across the country. It serves Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska. 

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News

New Research Uses Tree Ring Data to Assess Drought Severity in the Missouri River Basin

A newly-published article, partially funded by the North Central CASC and co-authored by Alaska CASC scientists Stephen Gray and Jeremy Littell, examined data collected from tree-rings to reconstruct historic natural streamflows and aid drought management and adaptation planning efforts in the Up


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New R package: Climate Futures Toolbox

The North Central Climate Adapatation Science Center (NC CASC) has released a new R package, Climate Futures Toolbox, with the goal to provide easy access to downscaled climate projections data (


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NC CASC seeks National Park Service Research Assistant

The NC CASC is looking to hire a National Park Service Research Assistant. Job description and application information follow:


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Western Water Assessment releases major report on state of the science and practice for the Colorado River

Western Water Assessment Director and NC CASC PI Lisa Dilling, along with fellow scientists at Western Water Assessment, released a major report on the state of the science and practice for the Colorado River.


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Spotlight
Photo courtesy of USGS

NC CASC and Earth Lab release Drought Index Portal

NC CASC and Earth Lab have recently released the Drought Index Portal (DrIP) through the University of Colorado, Boulder. DrIP is a web analytic resource to display, compare, and extract time series for various indicators of drought in the contiguous United States. The tool is hosted on the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies (CIRES) web platform to be available for broader research support.

Droughts take several forms (e.g., meteorological, hydrological, agricultural/ecological) driven by the interactions of different components of the physical climate system at shorter (weeks to months) and/or longer (months to years) timescales. No single index is generally able to capture all of these dimensions of drought. Thus a multi-index approach is recommended to understand the presence and evolution of drought. Limited online resources are available to quickly compare different drought indices and the f spatial and temporal patterns of drought . DrIP has been developed to meet this need by providing a singular portal on which to perform quick visual comparisons of drought indices across time and space, and extract regional time series data. Several other analytical features are also made available in DrIP including the ability to quantify and visualize any index’s time series as the Drought Severity Coverage Index, a metric developed by the US Drought Monitor to assess severity of drought and its extent.

Travis Williams and William Travis at Earth Lab developed the initial versions of this tool to support a Western Water Assessment/NIDIS project on decision analysis based on a consideration of different drought indices. Subsequently, NC CASC scientists (Rangwala, Johnson and others) engaged with Williams to further develop the tool. DrIP data is updated at the end of every month. All data is interpolated to a common 0.25 degree spatial grid before other functions occur. Future improvement plans include increasing this resolution to 0.125 degree and adding more indices.

 

https://droughtindexportal.colorado.edu/