Soil Moisture-Based Drought Monitoring in Oklahoma
Abstract
Real-time drought monitoring is essential for early detection and adaptive management to mitigate the negative impacts of drought on communities and ecosystems in drought-prone locations like Oklahoma where the 2011 drought cost the state's economy over $1.5 billion from agricultural losses alone. Drought monitoring has been hampered by a lack of data on one crucial drought indicator: plant available water. Agricultural losses and, by extension, the economic impacts of drought, are strongly linked to plant available water. Plant available water (PAW) is the amount of soil moisture currently in the profile which is available for plant uptake. We have recently developed and launched a novel drought monitoring system for Oklahoma based on real-time PAW monitoring at >100 locations via the Oklahoma Mesonet. To our knowledge, this is the world's first large-scale PAW monitoring system and offers unmatched potential for improving the use of soil moisture measurements in drought monitoring. The Oklahoma system may serve as a prototype for the development of soil moisture-based drought monitoring systems in other locations or at the national level. This presentation will describe the system and demonstrate some applications of the data for drought monitoring, prediction, and mitigation.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFM.H31L..04O
- Keywords:
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- 1812 HYDROLOGY / Drought;
- 1848 HYDROLOGY / Monitoring networks;
- 1852 HYDROLOGY / Plant uptake;
- 1866 HYDROLOGY / Soil moisture