Understanding the Role of the Low-Level Jet in Land-Atmosphere Interactions and Drought over the Southern Great Plains

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The role of local land conditions in drought evolution, as a potential agent of local climate self-regulation is poorly understood, as are the multi-scale land-atmosphere interactions involved. This project will improve understanding of drought evolution and its predictability in the southern Great Plains through synergistic efforts in analyzing impacts of low-level jets on local land-atmosphere couplings over the Great Plains and the regulatory role of the ocean on the Great Plains low-level jet. Specifically, this project will examine how local drought conditions may, under different conditions of weather sequencing and large-scale climate variability, serve to trigger rainfall and initiate an eventual recovery from drought. The primary tools for this project include observational data analyses (tabular and composite analyses, probabilistic event characterization, and synoptic and mesoscale analyses of droughts and low-level jet variability) and numerical modeling.The project will yield new knowledge and insights into mechanisms of drought predictability, which can in-turn be used to guide process-level refinement of weather-, seasonal forecast-, and climate models. For the semi-arid southern Great Plains, a pillar of the nation's food and energy security, it is critical that drought and its mechanisms be better understood, particularly in the context of climate variability and change. Every sector of the economy, in addition to public safety and health, benefits from improved forecast skill. Other important project outcomes include the validation of current cloud-resolving models and the training of one graduate student and one postdoctoral researcher in the areas of synoptic-scale and mesoscale meteorology, and coupled modeling.