In the Golden State’s Sierra Nevada mountains, for instance, snowpack is abysmal from dry weather, but also from warming and thus greater evaporation of the snow (called sublimation). These “ hot droughts” have severe consequences for places like California and the Colorado River Basin that rely on runoff from mountain snowpack for water supplies. The March temperatures were particularly warm around the West. According to NOAA, for the month of March, the average monthly temperature across the United States’ lower 48 was 44.1 degrees F (2.6 degrees above the 20th-century average), making it the warmest one-third of years of the 128-year climate record. In addition, abnormally warm temperatures are a unique and unsettling factor exacerbating the current Western drought. In these locations, the warm weather has led to increased evaporative demand and stress on vegetation. Extreme drought (D3) expanded in northern California, parts of Utah, and New Mexico. The California Department of Water Resources noted that about one-third of the water equivalency disappeared in a week. US Drought Monitor, Western USĪs the US Drought Monitor explained in the previous April 5 installment, some precipitation fell, but it wasn’t enough to change the drought status, which remains true today.Īcross much of the West, higher than normal temperatures last week caused premature snow melt, with snowpack values plummeting over just a few days. Only the western parts of Oregon, Washington and Montana, and an eastern sliver of Idaho remain drought-free. Whether it’s in Arizona, California, Utah, Idaho or Montana, drought has socked it to almost all regions of the American West.Īs of April 12, 2022, 90 percent of western US land coverage is in moderate drought or worse, according to the US Drought Monitor, holding steady from the previous week. Despite some recent precipitation, higher than average seasonal temperatures in the American West are wiping out the water stored in soil and mountain snowpack due to greater evaporation, prolonging and even worsening drought conditions. interp_like() which makes it easier to do the interpolation.High temperatures are are making drought conditions worse in the American Westĭuring times of drought, it might rain and even pour, but drought could persist and climate change can still create water scarcity. One of the popular methods is to use linear interpolation. Using interpolation, we can change this resolution (increase or decrease). While plotting the contour map, I had to ignore some smaller countries as it is not possible to calculate the average temperature for those. It gets tricky if the country is small such as Vatican City, Monaco, and Pacific islands. This is simple if the region is a big country like India, USA, China, etc. In the case of the NetCDF data I used, we want the region to be bigger than 25 km, at least over one axis, to have a temperature value inside the region. If we have a region big enough, we would see one or more temperature values lie inside the boundary of the region. In other words, we have a temperature value every 25 km in the X and Y direction. One degree is roughly 100 km so we can say that our resolution is 25 km. The data that I used to make the contour plots had a resolution of 0.25 in both directions of the grid. NetCDF data is gridded with equal spacing between the latitudes and longitudes. Interpolation is the process of estimating the values of the unsampled area using the sampled values. This is also called Spatial or Geospatial interpolation. The key to making all this possible is the interpolation of the temperature values in the NetCDF data. Basemap, Plotly - To make the visualizations.Rioxarray and Shapely- To clip/collect the grid points inside a polygon. Xarray - To read and manipulate the NetCDF file.The following python libraries are used for this purpose: To compute the average temperatures, we collect all points lying inside the boundary of the US (for instance) and simply take a mean of all. The figure above shows a bunch of grid points placed over a region (the US and its neighbors). Grid points over Shapefile (Photo by Author)
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