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Overview
Drought is a ubiquitous feature of the global water cycle that has tremendous societal and economic impacts throughout the world. It involves a broad array of physical processes and time scales encompassing the atmosphere, hydrosphere, land surface, cryosphere, and biosphere. As such, advancing our ability to predict drought requires improvements in modeling and observations encompassing all components of the physical climate system as well as improved knowledge of its impacts and interactions with human activities. While many activities are underway and much progress is being made in all these areas, major advances in the drought prediction problem will almost certainly require a more focused but still interdisciplinary program that builds on our current understanding of the nature of drought and encourages work on those aspects and variables that together link the evolution of drought from its inception to the eventual impact on quantities that most directly affect human activities. Moreover, given the large number of activities underway, increasing the level of international coordination and focus on drought and its prediction will help accelerate progress.
In November of 2008 the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) formed the Drought Interest Group (DIG) tasked with scoping out potential research areas and activities that address drought and to identify, encourage, and coordinate additional activities world-wide, leveraging what is already going on in the WCRP GEWEX and CLIVAR programs. The overall goal of the DIG efforts is to accelerate progress on improving prediction of drought on time scales of weeks to centuries, with a focus on developing capabilities and products that facilitate practical applications for stakeholders around the world. It is envisioned that this workshop will be an important step in advancing this goal.
The workshop will bring together scientists involved in all aspects of drought research and applications, as well as key users of drought information. The workshop welcomes contributions addressing the following topics:
1. User requirements for drought prediction information on sub-seasonal to centennial time scales
2. Current understanding of the mechanisms and predictability of drought on sub-seasonal to centennial time scales
3. Current drought prediction/projection capabilities on sub-seasonal to centennial time scales
4. Advancing regional drought prediction capabilities for variables and scales most relevant to user needs on sub-seasonal to centennial time scales.
Registration Timeline:
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5 October 2010
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Registration opens
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31 October
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Deadline for WCRP travel support applications
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30 November
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Notification of funding decisions
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21 January 2011
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Registration closes
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2-4 March 2011
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Workshop, Barcelona
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