Source: NC CLIMATE OFFICE, 9/23/21


A dusty old weather pun says that drought is a very dry topic, but in practice, communicating about drought is an issue saturated with challenges, misconceptions, and opportunities.

That was the inspiration behind a NOAA-funded project that our office completed in partnership with the Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (CISA), aiming to increase the transparency and effectiveness of drought communications in North Carolina.

After two years of stakeholder engagement, resource development, and evaluation, we have wrapped up that work — titled Project Nighthawk, after the native bird species that’s both threatened by and resilient to drought — and we recently published a paper with findings from our research in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Communication Needs
At the heart of our project was the tricky nature of drought monitoring. Unlike measuring wind speeds in a hurricane or rainfall from a thunderstorm, we can’t just put out a weather sensor and let it tell us how drought-y it is outside, nor does drought show up on a weather map like a cold front creeping in.

Our official state drought status is discussed and updated each week by the North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council (NC DMAC), a multi-agency group that considers indicators ranging from recent precipitation to streamflows to agricultural reports to wildfire activity.

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