Lee Schmelzer, Animal Science/ Range Science, Montana State University & University of Nevada Reno, 7680 Jays Place, Reno, NV 89506
For eleven years Montana has been facing significantly declining precipitation totals and four years of severe drought. Conditions have forced many people to question how we determine drought, the long-term effects of drought and what tools we have to help mitigate and educate about drought. For decades meteorological data has been collected for various sites throughout Montana and the western United States. While this data provides important information on a very broad scale, a user is constrained by resolution in developing specific local applications as well as missing key pieces of information including any information on soil moisture, wind direction, or wind speed which all have explicit ties to evapotranspiration and forage production. Without these variables it is difficult to understand the current, historical or future effects of drought conditions. The final product will be applied to twenty specific counties, with future involvement statewide. We hope to develop new web based tools to assist range managers and agency personnel alike in making critical decisions relative to disaster declarations and drought conditions. These tools will also provide information for future range production and management decisions based on local weather and soil moisture information. In addition, we will develop web accessible climate databases, utilizing historical and current data, meaningful analysis tools and integrated models to provide land managers increased awareness of climatological conditions which influence range production. The analysis tools to be developed will be identified by the end users needs, for example, predicting forage production on range, based on the percentage of the long-term median total for April, May, and June precipitation that an area receives; serving as an early warning system for drought conditions.
