Abstract
For an agricultural state like Nebraska, the economic, environmental, and social impacts of drought are severe. While precipitation is required to reduce drought conditions, the rate of drought improvement varies depending on both total precipitation over an area as well as antecedent soil moisture conditions. The focus of this research was to analyze the response of meteorological variables at surface stations across Nebraska during weeks within a growing season when the Crop Moisture Index, Palmer Z Index, or Palmer Modified Drought Index indicated a positive improvement. Utilizing 55 Automated Weather Data Network (AWDN) stations within eight individual climate divisions, a 15 year climatological dataset of weekly observations, including 12 individual meteorological parameters, was compared with weekly improvements in each drought index. In order to determine how the greatest magnitude of drought index improvement corresponded to each individual station variable, multiple statistical regressions were produced along with corresponding RMSE values from residuals. Results from this study indicated statistically significant correlations between 8 of 12 AWDN variables with the Z index, 6 of 12 AWDN variables with the Crop Moisture Index, and 2 of 12 AWDN variables with the Palmer Modified Drought Index. Additionally, the same statistical regressions were performed on Historical Climate Network (HCN) data and compared to AWDN regression results. The HCN precipitation produced better overall R-values than AWDN precipitation, however AWDN temperature and potential evapotranspiration yielded better overall correlations with each Palmer index.