Geology topics

Mike Hobbins

Publications and source records attributed to Mike Hobbins.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

USGS2025

Prioritization of research on drought assessment in a changing climate

Drought is a period of abnormally dry weather that leads to hydrological imbalance. Drought assessments determine the characteristics, severity, and impacts of a drought. Climate change adds conceptual and quantitative challenges to traditional drought assessments. This paper highlights the challenges of assessing drought in a climate made non-stationary by human activities or natural variability. To address these challenges, we then identify 10 key research priorities for advancing drought science and improving assessments in a changing climate. The priorities focus on improving drought indicators to account for non-stationarity, evaluating drought impacts and their trends, addressing regional differences in non-stationarity, determining the physical drivers of drought and how they are changing, capturing precipitation variability, and understanding the drivers of aridification. Ultimately, improved drought assessments will inform better risk management, adaptation strategies, and planning, especially in areas where climate change significantly alters drought dynamics. This perspective offers a path toward more accurate and effective drought management in a non-stationary climate system.

Earth's Future↗

USGS2024

Flash drought: A state of the science review

In the two decades, since the advent of the term “flash drought,” considerable research has been directed toward the topic. Within the scientific community, we have actively forged a new paradigm that has avoided a chaotic evolution of conventional drought but instead recognizes that flash droughts have distinct dynamics and, particularly, impacts. We have moved beyond the initial debate over the definition of flash drought to a centralized focus on the triad of rapid onset, drought development, and associated impacts. The refinement toward this general set of principles has led to significant progress in determining key variables for monitoring flash drought development, identifying notable case studies, and compiling fundamental physical characteristics of flash drought. However, critical focus areas still remain, including advancing our knowledge on the atmospheric and oceanic drivers of flash drought; developing flash drought-specific detection indices and monitoring systems tailored to practitioners; improving subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction of these events; constraining uncertainty in flash drought and impact projections; and using social science to further our understanding of impacts, particularly with regard to sectors that lie outside of our traditional hydroclimatological focus, such as wildfire management and food-security monitoring. Researchers and stakeholders working together on these critical topics will assure society is resilient to flash drought in a changing climate.

Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota↗

USGS2023

A global long-term daily reanalysis of reference evapotranspiration for drought and food-security monitoring

NOAA has developed a global reference evapotranspiration (ET 0 ) reanalysis using the UN Food and Agriculture Organization formulation (FAO-56) of the Penman-Monteith equation forced by MERRA phase 2 (MERRA2) meteorological and radiative drivers. The NOAA ET 0 reanalysis is provided daily from January 1, 1980 to the near-present at a resolution of 0.5° latitude × 0.625° longitude. The reanalysis is verified against station data across southern Africa, a region presenting both significant challenges regarding hydroclimatic variability and observational quantity and quality and significant potential benefits to food-insecure populations. These data are generated from observations from the Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (SASSCAL) network. We further verified globally against spatially distributed ET 0 derived from two reanalyses–the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) and Princeton Global Forcing (PGF)–and these verifications produced similar results, yet demonstrated wide regional and seasonal differences. We also present cases that verify the operational applicability of the reanalysis in long-established drought, famine, crop- and pastoral-stress metrics, and in predictability assessments of drought forecasts.

Nature Scientific Data↗

USGS2022

Getting ahead of flash drought: From early warning to early action

Flash droughts, characterized by their unusually rapid intensification, have garnered increasing attention within the weather, climate, agriculture, and ecological communities in recent years due to their large environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Because flash droughts intensify quickly, they require different early warning capabilities and management approaches than are typically used for slower-developing “conventional” droughts. In this essay, we describe an integrated research-and-applications agenda that emphasizes the need to reconceptualize our understanding of flash drought within existing drought early warning systems by focusing on opportunities to improve monitoring and prediction. We illustrate the need for engagement among physical scientists, social scientists, operational monitoring and forecast centers, practitioners, and policy-makers to inform how they view, monitor, predict, plan for, and respond to flash drought. We discuss five related topics that together constitute the pillars of a robust flash drought early warning system, including the development of 1) a physically based identification framework, 2) comprehensive drought monitoring capabilities, and 3) improved prediction over various time scales that together 4) aid impact assessments and 5) guide decision-making and policy. We provide specific recommendations to illustrate how this fivefold approach could be used to enhance decision-making capabilities of practitioners, develop new areas of research, and provide guidance to policy-makers attempting to account for flash drought in drought preparedness and response plans.

Bulletin of American Meteorological Society (BAMS)↗