This project is supported through the Presidential Young Investigators Award program. The studies conducted during the next five years will concentrate on the development and analysis of the occurrence and duration of droughts using stochastic differential equations to model continental water and heat balance. The statistical distribution of drought durations for several climatic case examples will be developed. The persistent and long-range dependence characteristics for this model will be derived and related to climatic forcing factors. Through the model for hydroclimatology of continental- type climates, the importance of hydrologic land surface-atmosphere interactions in the dynamics of drought will be illustrated. The benefits of this research will be to better understand the stochastic perturbations and year-to-year random variations in large scale atmospheric flow features which occasionally trigger drought conditions that persist and impact human society and the natural environment. With a better understanding mitigation of drought consequences could be achieved.
