ALBERT

Description: State hazard mitigation plans guide state and local agencies in actions they may take to reduce their vulnerability to extreme events. However, because they are written for a general audience, they must be written in a way for a layperson to understand. In many cases, the people writing these plans are not meteorologists or do not have access to meteorological expertise. Consequently, descriptions of hazards may be taken from websites, other documents, or perhaps authoritative sources. This leads to inconsistencies in the way hazards are portrayed in the plans, which increases the difficulty of translating proposed actions to local governments or to other states. This article delves into the issue of these variances and how it affects those who write state hazard mitigation plans. For this brief text, the hazards discussed in state plans that fall in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP)’s region are covered with a comparison of definitions from the National Weather Service (NWS) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS). States within the SCIPP region include Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. This study found that it is more common for states to use key words from NWS and AMS hazard definitions than to use exact definitions. The goal of this article is to prompt a discussion about the inconsistency of terminology used in state hazard mitigation plans and to spread awareness of this issue so that future plans can keep their unique elements while providing a better description and understanding of the included hazards.

Description: Hydrologic extremes of drought and flooding stress water resources and damage communities in the Red River basin, located in the south-central United States. For example, the summer of 2011 was the third driest summer in Oklahoma state history and the driest in Texas state history. When the long-term drought conditions ended in the spring of 2015 as El Niño brought record precipitation to the region, there were also catastrophic floods that caused loss of life and property. Hydrologic extremes such as these have occurred throughout the historical record, but decision-makers need to know how the frequency of these events is expected to vary in a changing climate so that they can mitigate these impacts and losses. Therefore, the goals of this study focus on how these hydrologic extremes impact water resources in the Red River basin, how the frequency of such events is expected to change in the future, and how this study can aid local water-resource managers and decision-makers. Heavy-precipitation events were defined at the historical 90th and 99th percentiles, and severe-drought events were identified at a threshold of the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index’s value of less than or equal to −1. The results show an increase in the frequency of severe-drought events in the western Red River basin and a rise in heavy-rainfall events in the east by the end of the century, especially under RCP 8.5. Therefore, decision-makers and water-resource managers will likely need to prepare for both hydrologic extremes depending on their location within the basin.

Description: Climate models provide information that resource managers, policy makers, and researchers can use when planning for the future. While this information is valuable in the broad sense, the low spatial-resolution often lacks local details that resource managers and decision makers need to plan for their communities. Therefore, statistically downscaled climate projections provide a high-resolution output and offer local information that is more beneficial than coarse-resolution global climate model output. In the Red River Basin, located in the south-central U.S., this detailed information is used to develop long-term water plans. This area is prone to drought conditions and heavy precipitation events, and studies have consistently estimated that this will continue in the future. This paper introduces a dataset of statistically downscaled climate projections of daily minimum and maximum temperature and daily precipitation that is a useful tool for studies regarding climatological and hydrological aspects in the region. The dataset was created using two quantile mapping techniques to downscale the CCSM4, MPI-ESM-LR, and MIROC5 model outputs to a 0.1-degree spatial resolution. Furthermore, we describe the added value of coproduction of knowledge between climate scientists and end users, or in this case impacts modelers and decision makers, for creating climate projections that can be used for climate risk assessments. A case study of the data’s development and application is provided, detecting the mean daily changes in temperature and precipitation through the end of the century in the Red River Basin for two representative concentration pathways. After applying the users’ inputs to develop the datasets, results for this example estimate an increase in mean daily precipitation in the eastern portion of the basin and as much as a 15% decline in the west by the end of the century. Furthermore, mean daily temperature is expected to rise across the entire basin in all scenarios by up to 6–7°C.