$1.2 million follow-up grant to support drought-monitoring work

A $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency awarded to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will help maintain and improve on a system tracking drought and other climate conditions in the United States. The grant extends ongoing research activities through May 31, 2008.

The award, granted to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, will continue efforts to provide an exhaustive climate condition database that agriculture producers can easily tap into through a Web interface.

An initial investment of $1 million from the state of Nebraska for geospatial analysis and decision support systems was made in 1998. That money has been leveraged into a total of $3.5 million in external funding.

Faculty and graduate students in the department are working with climatologists and geographers, and are maintaining and improving upon a weather data collection infrastructure with a particular focus on drought. Steve Goddard, associate professor of computer science and engineering, is principal investigator on the grant.

The system allows the analysis of data from weather station networks and converts it into a format that can be tapped into efficiently, Goddard said. A collection of computer programs help quantify climate conditions, with drought as a primary focus.

The program joins the expertise of the UNL Department of Computer Science and Engineering with the National Drought Mitigation Center and the High Plains Regional Climate Center, both located at UNL.

Data has been pulled from the Applied Climate Information System, a programming interface that provides data from weather station networks. Data include daily precipitation and temperature values.

Much of the work at UNL consists of devising computer routines that create database records, of which more than 1 billion have been created so far.

Data is used to quantify the severity of a drought. For example, using the Standardized Precipitation Index, a number is computed that represents the number of standard deviations the measured precipitation deviates from the normalized mean over a specified interval of time.

Agriculture producers can use the Web site (http://nadss.unl.edu) to obtain a spreadsheet with table data or a map. The process involves gathering the data, storing it, performing computations, and then representing it in different formats.

"After working with this for several years, we are ready to release another version of this set of tools that will let us easily extend it for a lot of other domains or disciplines," Goddard said.

Those other domains could include hydrological or groundwater modeling.

Recent work on the system has entailed developing the computer program interface to make it easier to use for the layperson who may be unfamiliar with computer processes. Pre-computed maps will be created so information can be delivered to the user more quickly.

Workshops are given on a continual basis to train agriculture producers and get feedback from them on what they would like to see regarding the available tools and any problems they are having. For workshop information, contact Goddard by e-mail.

CONTACT: Steve Goddard, Assoc. Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, (402) 472-9968