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Mike Hobbins

Evaporative demand (E0) both drives and responds to droughts based on interactions across the land surface-atmosphere interface, and can be exploited to signal agricultural, hydrologic, and ecological droughts. In this chapter, we argue that using a fully physically based measure of E0 moves the drought community toward a more complete understanding of drought processes that will enhance its abilities with regard to early warning and drought monitoring in the present day and drought-risk assessment under future climate change scenarios. We examine regional characteristics in E0 and their behavior during droughts in the recent historical period across different hydroclimates. We review physical mechanisms driving...
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The data are a long-term (1980-present), daily reanalysis of reference evapotranspiration, covering the globe at a spatial resolution of 0.625° Longitude x 0.5° Latitude. Reference evapotranspiration is a measure of evaporative demand, or the "thirst of the atmosphere", basically how much moisture from the surface could evaporate into overpassing air, assuming (i) that enough water is available to evaporate and (ii) the surface is covered with a specific reference crop that completely shades the ground (some other conditions also apply). For this dataset, reference evapotranspiration is derived from the daily implementation of the Penman-Monteith reference evapotranspiration equation (Monteith, 1965) as codified...
Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) is remotely-sensed high-resolution information of the evaporative response from the land in near real time. LERI assesses anomalies in actual evapotranspiration (ETa), as percentiles, across the Contiguous US and northern Mexico at a 1-km spatial resolution. LERI is based on the ETa data produced by the U. S. Geological Survey using the operational Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEBop) model. SSEBop combines evapotranspiration fraction generated from remotely sensed MODIS thermal imagery, acquired every 8 days, with climatological atmospheric evaporative demand. To quantify LERI, a rank-based, non-parametric method is used to estimate percentiles of the SSEBop ETa,...
This project facilitated the engagement of the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center’s (NC CASC) Climate Foundational Science Area (FSA) to identify and address the physical climate science challenges that are important for ecologists and natural resource managers in the NC CASC region, as well as meet their needs for climate information to assess impacts to their desired system and develop strategies for effective climate adaptation. A drought index called the Landscape Evaporative Response Index (LERI) was developed to provide a near real-time assessment of soil moisture conditions across the Contiguous United States (CONUS) based on satellite observations. This projects also supported development of...
This 2-pager describes the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI), which is a drought index that can serve as an indicator of both rapidly evolving “flash” droughts (developing over a few weeks) and sustained droughts (developing over months but lasting up to years).
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