Dr. Joseph Gutenson gave a guest lecture on November 11, 2019. He is a UA Alumnus ('16 PhD in Environmental Engineering) and is a hydrologist at the National Water Center (NWC), Tuscaloosa AL since August 2019. Before joining the NWC, he worked for the USACE Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) from 2016 through 2019. He shared his past ERDC projects and explained the purpose and main taskss of the NWC.  

A paper about US drought awareness is published in Palgrave Communications - Nature. The title of the paper is "Spatiotemporal Patterns of US Drought Awareness".
  In this paper, we presented the (first) national-scale study to reveal the spatiotemporal patterns of drought awareness over the contiguous United States (CONUS) using Google Trends data and an advanced statistical technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Results show that the first two PC modes can explain 48% (38% for PC1 and 10% for PC2) of the total variance of state-level drought awareness. We find that the PC1 mode relates to a national pattern of drought awareness across the CONUS. The spatiotemporal patterns further imply that residents in the Northeastern US region are the most aware of the emergence of drought, regardless of the geographic location of the occurrence. The results illustrate how search engine queries and social media data can help develop an effective and efficient plan for drought mitigation in the future.

​Weather, Climate, and Society publishes research that encompasses economics, policy analysis, political science, history, and institutional, social, and behavioral scholarship relating to weather and climate, including climate change. 

The AMS Council has eliminated page charges for WCAS.

Please check the following journal front web page. [web link]

A new research article is accepted in Journal of Hydrology. The title of the article is "Atlantic Ocean Sea Surface Temperatures and Southeast United States Streamflow Variability: Associations with the Recent Multi-decadal Decline" [link]. This study is supported by our NSF P2C2 project [link]. 

Highlights:
• Multidecadal decline in observed records of Southeastern U.S. streamflow since ∼1990.
• Proposed drivers of this decline are AMO warm phase coupled with multiple La Nina events.
• SVD gridded Atlantic Oceans (AO) SSTs confirm a teleconnection with SEUS streamflow.
• SVD indicates rapid increase in AO SSTs corresponds to rapid decrease in SEUS streamflow.
• Using SVD to establish a specific SST driver eliminates noise and verifies the AMO signal.

A new research article is accepted in Weather, Climate, and Society. The title of the article is "Monitoring of Drought Awareness from Google Trends: A Case Study of the 2011–17 California Drought" [link].
In this study, we investigated potential triggers of the peaks of drought awareness and characterized the decay patterns after the peaks of drought awareness during the 2011-17 California Drought via Google Trends. 
   The key findings of this study are

1. There are four peaks of drought awareness during the 2011-17 California Drought with a gap (longer than one year) between the onset of the 2011-17 CA drought and the first peak.
2. The potential triggers of drought awareness varied from natural and human factors depending on the stage of drought.
3. Human factors drive a slower decay process of drought awareness than natural factors.

Madden was selected by the Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) and will work in the WPTO, Washington DC after her graduation. She assessed the economic benefits from the largest 228 dams in Alabama through independent projects in my Hydrology courses (CE575: Hydrology and CE591: Computational Hydrology). Her project was presented as a poster in the UA Water Policy Summit last spring. Congratulations, Madden!

Applications for the EERE STP program are accepted and reviewed all year. Please find more details of the DOE EERE STP program application from their website if you are interested.