When people think about droughts they think about the short term effects that are playing roles on the economy, however, many people don’t think of the long term affects that droughts can have on the economy. Droughts are dangerous, they don’t only affect one area or thing but can disable or damage an entire food chain, which in the end can cause serious problems for people all over the U.S. over an extended amount of time. The focal point of this paper will be about the drought of 2012 and how it affected the U.S. agriculture including crops, livestock, and even food prices later on down the road.
Droughts, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center, originate from a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period of time, usually a season or more, resulting in a water shortage for some activity, group, or environmental sector (N.D.M.C, 2014). However, droughts differ depending on location and geography of the land, for example, living in California and having a dry summer wouldn’t be considered a drought because that is expected for that certain area. As we can see, droughts can be hard to define or diagnose for the reason of location because there are many factors that play a role on considering if it is a drought or not.
Droughts will creep in on an environment and people will not realize they are in a drought until they are right smack in the middle of it. According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, droughts are caused immediately from the predominant sinking motion of air (subsidence) that results in compressional warming or high pressure, which inhibits cloud formation and results in lower relative humidity and less precipitation (N.D.M.C, 2014). Unfortunately, scientist cannot predict droughts any m...
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References
Botelho, G. CNN U.S. (2012). From dry rivers to dead deer, drought's impact felt everywhere. Received from http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/15/us/drought-impact/
Crutchfield, S. United States Department of Agriculture. (2013). U.S. Drought 2012: Farm and Food Impacts. Received from http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/in-the-news/us-drought-2012-farm-and-food-impacts.aspx
National Drought Mitigation Center. (2014). Predicting Drought. Received from http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/PredictingDrought.aspx
Rayburn, E. West Virginia University Extension Service. (2005). Drought Management Before, During, and After the Drought. Received from http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/forglvst/DroughtManagementBeforeandAfter.pdf
Smith, A. CNN Money. (2012). Get Ready to Pay More for Your Steak. Received from http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/30/pf/food-prices-drought/index.htm?iid=EL
Water shortage in arid and semi-arid regions and declining its availability to a crisis ...
The California water drought has been declared a crisis by the governor of California. 2013 was the driest year on record, and California could be running out of water. Californians should be water wise, and their use, or no use, of water will have an enormous impact on this drought. They can use the techniques published in a recent Time article called, 5 Ways to Bust California’s Drought, to reduce their water use. Landscape techniques, alternate water sources, and the personal conservation of water can reduce the use of water, and can have a positive change on this water crisis.
Droughts in Wyoming’s future are unpredictable and uncertain; however, Richard Guldin of the Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, has made some predictions for the water situati...
Hembreee, Brandon. "Southwest Could See Continuation of Drought." Southwest Farm Press 40.3 17 January 2013: 1-7. Web.
• Campbell E., Durisin M. (2014). California Farms Going Thirsty as Drought Burns $5 Billion Hole. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-29/california-farms-going-thirsty-as-drought-burns-5-billion-hole.html
To conclude, the droughts ended in the period of 1940. The Dust Bowl was much more complicated than a man-made environmental disaster. It was a huge catastrophe of the world you couldn’t even imagine happening in the present. It is known for the hundreds of storms killing everything in sight, especially children. McArthur points out "Although the rain brought back life to the prairie, the Dust Bowl remains a significance memory for all Americans. It was a learning experience for the Unites States, but a lesson that came with suffering.” (35). We are taking the experience of the Dust Bowl and bringing it into today’s techniques to avoid another environmental catastrophe.
Reeve, Ross. United States. Bureau of Reclamation. Drought In the Upper Colorado River Basin. 2014. Web. 14 Nov 2014.
This is not a problem which is limited to the developing world either, as even the United States has also been experiencing the effects of water shortages in recent years. In the US, the average citizen uses more than three times the amount of water as many European countries (Data 360). A key difference between the US and the European continent is the geographical variation. A majority of the large cities in America where water is becoming more scarce are located in the West and are surrounded by arid landscapes, although it should be noted that shortages are not limited to this area alone (The Atlantic). Most water usage in the country is reserved for irrigation of farmland, general landscaping, and home use (EPA). It is estimated by the EPA that the average family uses over 400 gallons of water every day, and that the cumulative volume of water used in homes is much less than the former two greatest uses. Not only is extreme overuse a problem, but seasonal droughts have become increasingly frequent throughout the US. Here, we will look more closely at the causes, effects, and implications of water shortages across the United States and beyond.
Introduction: Drought affects our lives in many different ways because water is such an important part of so many of our activities. We need water to live, and animals and plants do too. We need water to grow the food we eat. We also use water for many different things in our lives, like washing dishes, cooking, bathing, and swimming or river rafting, so water is very important for us to survive.
For example, then, drought is difficult to define in modern standards, it is typically classified as a shortage of water, usually associated with a deficit of rainfall. That is, drought occurs when the demand or use for water exceeds the current supply of water. It follows, then, the Colorado river drought does not solely affect one area, it’s grandeur has affected the whole southwestern United States. Additionally, the Colorado River Basin Water Management: Evaluating and Adjusting to Hydroclimatic provides information on the meager volume of rain fall. In theory, then, combined with increased temperatures from global warming, and a deficient of rainfall both circumstances have had a descending effect on most surrounding
...ny foods have already gone up largely because of the drought. The prices of meat, eggs, fruits, and vegetables and a lot more foods have been shooting up. In 2012 the drought had prices rising which led to it costing the U.S. economy about $30 billion; the only severe weather disaster that has cost more of an impact was Hurricane Sandy.
Already scientists have observed that more than 75% of the recent economic losses are caused by natural hazards which can be attributed to wind storms, floods, droughts and other climate related hazards. In the year 2008, the U.S. state of Iowa was on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Weeks of heavy rain in the Midwest caused rivers to swell and levees to break. Millions of acres of farmland are now underwater, their plantings most likely destroyed. By March, Iowa had tied its third-highest monthly snowfall in 121 years of record keeping, and then came the rain. April’s st...
Freshwater is essential to not only life, but also the economy and society's ability to function properly. As of January 17, 2014, and to this day, California has been in a perpetual state of emergency; the worst drought recorded in the state’s history has forced Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr to take executive action, in order to combat the extraordinary lack of water reserves. If left unregulated, the water shortage could culminate as one of the greatest calamities in California history. Not only would California’s agricultural industry collapse, a chain reaction would be set off, causing a halt of the state’s economy and eventually leaving millions of people across the state without functional access to water. In order to ensure that California
Residents of Southern or Coastal California may not realize the extensive issues that dry climate has caused on one of the state’s most profitable industries. Agriculture is not just a way of life in California’s Central Valley, it is the way of life for most, in some shape or form. For instance, the Central Valley accounts for just under two percent of the country’s cropland. However, money wise it produces nearly half of the nation’s fruit and nuts (Nijhuis 1). As a result of the drought, water given to farmers to water crops has been reduced. On the contrary, the water being taken from farmers is not going to city use but for environmental use. Water being directed for environmental use can be defined as water that is used to sustain certain ecosystems, national parks, forests, and wetlands. Up to 4.4 million acre-feet of water goes to environmental use annually, meanwhile farmers are being forced to sell dried up fields and find a new way of living. Another issue is that both the people and farms are receiving less water than the state has contracted that they would receive. The state has been truthful to environmentalists however, by providing them with the full amount of water contracted. While conditions have worsened for the agricultural aspect of California, farmers are finding relief in pumping groundwater
Meteorological drought is referred as a precipitation deficiency, in comparison to normal or base line condition. We use Standardized Precipitation index (SPI-n, where n = 3, 6, 9 and 12 months accumulation period) as an index of meteorological drought. SPI represents a statistical z-score or the number of standard deviations (following a probability distribution, usually Gamma and back transformed to standard normal distribution) above or below that an event is from the mean (McKee et al. 1993; Sims et al., 2002). SPI is spatially invariant and probabilistic in nature and able to capture different drought states ranging from short, medium and long-term drought conditions depending on the length of the accumulation period. SPI has number of advantages, such as (Lloyd-Hughes and Saunders, 2002); (i) The SPI is based on precipitation and requires computation of only two