As climate scientists continue to research unpredictable weather patterns and their correlation with global warming, researchers with the University of Arkansas at Monticello have created a tool that could help to better predict and understand drought patterns in Arkansas.

Using satellite imagery, a team including Hamdi Zurqani, an assistant professor of geospatial science for the College of Forestry, Agriculture and Natural Resources at UA Monticello, created an online mapping tool that shows drought levels across Arkansas over multiple decades. The Arkansas Vegetation Drought Explorer incorporates data from the Vegetation Health Index, a tool that is used to monitor drought conditions around the world.

Zurqani began his research in 2022. He said he came up with the idea after realizing there was a lack of available data about weather patterns in Arkansas.

"I realized there is not a state climate office. There is no climatologist in the state," he said. "Environmental scientists can benefit from this information, agriculture sectors, even insurance companies and policymakers can look at this."

He said that similar databases do not exist in other states and that the tool could be used in other regions plagued by droughts, like Sub-Saharan Africa.

During the development of the Arkansas Vegetation Drought Explorer, Zurqani said he and his team noticed some interesting trends with historical drought and rain patterns in the state. Shorter-term data, for example, showed more frequent droughts, yet an analysis of longer time periods indicated that drought conditions may actually be improving in some areas, indicating greater resilience to climate change.

Dry spells are more common in eastern and southern Arkansas and near the Mississippi River. The researchers were also able to track the emergence of flash droughts, a condition marked by low precipitation along with increased temperatures, radiation and wind speeds that speed up evaporation from the soil. Flash droughts can wreak havoc for farmers and forestry operations, Zurqani said.

Flash droughts are an ongoing topic of research, with scientists trying to better understand the phenomenon as well as their impact, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

"Flash drought occurs more often than many people realize and can cause major impacts," the agency's website says. "Significant negative impacts to the agricultural sector have been better documented than impacts to other sectors and the environment. Flash drought has occurred in the southeastern United States as recently as the fall of 2019. In a widespread flash drought across the central U.S. during the summer of 2012, damages in the central Great Plains were estimated to be in excess of $30 billion."

The research by Zurqani and his colleagues was published in the November issue of the Ecological Indicators Journal.