Regional Influences of Vegetation on Complex Droughts in North America

This proposal hypothesizes that vegetation influences the evolution and character of North American droughts and that ESMs are unable to properly represent this influence. This is an important topic that will help to improve NOAA's drought predictions. The basic approach will be to a) apply Granger causality, convergent cross mapping, and several other mathematical causality-testing mechanisms to a variety of (pseudo-)observational datasets of climate and vegetation to try to deduce what pathways are most important for the vegetation response to - and influence on - drought. The same statistical methods will then be applied to a variety of DECK and CMIP simulations to deduce what vegetation processes are poorly represented in droughts.