Workshop to develop CRT (Climate Resilience Toolkit) Case Studies

This Workshop continues the theme of a similar session (jointly with Ag & Climate Cluster and Energy & Climate Workgroup) at the ESIP Winter Meeting in Washington, DC on CDI (Climate Data Initiative), CRT (Climate Resilience Toolkit), and ongoing work that could form the bases for CRT Case Studies.

Workshop agenda:

- Introduction to the workshop, logistics, etc.

- Connection with the "Telling Your Science Story" session; larger goal to establish a CRT pipeline at the ESIP level

- Introduction to CRT

- Brief description of work related to agriculture that forms the basis for a potential CRT Case Study

--- Forrest Melton (NASA Ames) et al. Satellite mapping of drought impacts on agricultural production and land fallowing in California's Central Valley

The ongoing drought in California substantially reduced surface water supplies for millions of acres of irrigated farmland in California's Central Valley. Rapid assessment of drought impacts on agricultural production could aid water managers in assessing mitigation options, and guide decision making with respect to mitigation of drought impacts. Satellite remote sensing offers an efficient way to provide quantitative assessments of drought impacts on agricultural production and of increases in fallow acreage associated with reductions in water supply. A key advantage of satellite-based assessments is that they can provide a measure of land fallowing that is consistent across both space and time. We describe an approach for monthly and seasonal mapping of fallow agricultural acreage, developed as part of a joint effort by USGS, USDA, NASA, and the California Department of Water Resources, to provide timely assessments of land fallowing during drought events. We used the Central Valley of California as a pilot region for development and testing of an operational approach.

To provide quantitative measures of fallow agricultural acreage from satellite data early in the season, we developed a decision tree algorithm and applied it to time series of data from Landsat TM, ETM+, OLI, and MODIS. Our effort focused on developing indicators of drought impacts in the March-September time period, based on measures of crop development patterns relative to a reference period with average or above-average rainfall. To assess the accuracy of the algorithms, monthly ground validation surveys were conducted across 670 fields from March to September in 2014, 2015, and 2016. We present the approach, along with updated results from the accuracy assessment, and data and maps of land fallowing in the Central Valley.

--- Phu Nguyen (UC Irvine) et al. RainSphere – a new tool for analysing global remotely sensed rainfall estimates

RainSphere (hosted at http://rainsphere.eng.uci.edu) has recently been developed by the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at the University of California, Irvine for scientific studies and applications, based on precipitation estimation from remotely sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks – Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR; Ashouri et al., 2015). RainSphere has functionalities that allow users to visualize and query spatio-temporal statistics of global daily satellite precipitation for the past three decades. With a few mouse-clicks, users can easily obtain a report of time series, spatial plots, and basic trend analysis of rainfall for various spatial domains of interest (point location, watershed, basin, political division, and country) and temporal periods (yearly, monthly, monthly by year, and daily). RainSphere allows data to speak for themselves in a way that is easily understandable by the public, thus helping to increase the number of informed participants in the conversation on climate and climate variability.

- Two concurrent breakout groups, one for each of the presenters and led by them. The groups discuss and draft the incipient stories that would become CRT Case Studies, using the CRT "templates."

- The groups recombine and share results and thoughts and prepare for the related afternoon session, "Telling Your Science Story," in which the two incipient stories would start down the path towards becoming CRT Case Studies.