PACK POINTS
Framing the forecast
By using climate forecasts for short-term planning, water managers can better plan for potential shortages due to drought.
With much of the Southeast finally recovering from a major drought, many state and local governments are looking for ways to improve water resource management in anticipation of the next extended dry period.
Fortunately, continued improvement of climate forecasts is resulting in better information about what rainfall and streamflow may look like months in advance. An NC State engineer has developed an innovative water management framework that would take advantage of these forecasts to plan for droughts or excess rain in order to make the most efficient use of an area's water resources.
By using climate forecasts for short-term planning, water managers can better plan for potential shortages due to drought, says Dr. Sankar Arumugam, an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering.
The research “proposes a framework that would use forecast data to improve water management, allowing water managers to be proactive with their planning rather than reacting to events after the fact,” Arumugam says.
According to Arumugam, advances in the understanding of how changes in ocean temperature affect the atmosphere and, ultimately, precipitation and temperature, make seasonal or longer-term climate forecasts increasingly reliable. At the same time, Arumugam says, water management is becoming more important due to increasing global population — which means greater water demand — and global climate change, which could stress both humid and arid regions with the former getting wetter and the latter becoming drier.
As part of the research, Arumugam and other researchers performed a case study looking at the state of Ceara in Brazil, which is an arid region that receives little or no rainfall from June through the following January.
“We found there would be significant benefits for the region, primarily
in alleviating the vulnerability of poor farming communities if this framework
was implemented,” says Arumugam. 