Southwest Drought and Impact on Vegetation

Research by Dr. Ali Behrangi, Mostafa Javadian, and Bill Smith has been looking into the Back-to-Back natural disasters of 2020-2021 and their effect on the environment and drought-conditions in the Southwest. They discuss the extremes of the last few years within regards to monsoon conditions, and how the extremes have been getting more and more extreme. By referencing the summer drought of 2012, as well as drought and rain conditions over the span of 1986 to 2019, they were able to calculate comparisons between 2020 and 2021 to the average of all of these years, while simultaneously using 2012’s drought as an extreme data point.

Part of this project also included a field scale analysis of the heat of plots of vegetation based on rainfall intermittency. This was accomplished in Santa Rita, at the Santa Rita experimental range. Varying plots of and were covered, allowing for full control of rainfall intermittency over the selected area. Using ICI 9640 Thermal and Nikon RGB cameras, the plots were then photographed using thermal imaging to study the canopy temperature of each section. The research concluded that more intense and less frequent precipitation decreases the canopy temperature and increases carbon uptake.

Currently, Dr. Ali Behrangi of U of A leads a project in joint with NASA to study precipitation records globally using satellite imaging, a continuation of longstanding previous efforts to measure global precipitation into one homogenous data set. This project is still unfolding and is predicted to conclude this year, in 2023.