Steven Quiring's Research Interests

Research: Hydrologic Modeling/Monitoring

My doctoral research focused on developing a real-time Agricultural Drought Monitoring System for the State of Delaware that provides agricultural producers with detailed soil moisture information at a relatively high spatial resolution. The issue of spatial resolution is extremely important since convective precipitation (which provides much of the moisture for crops) and soil characteristics (which have a major impact on soil moisture storage) are spatially heterogeneous. Most of the drought monitoring products that are routinely provided by organizations like the National Drought Mitigation Center are national products that are too coarse to provide the detailed information required for making operational decisions. The drought monitoring system that I am developed provides daily soil moisture and crop yield estimates at a resolution of 4 km. This information can be used by agricultural producers to make management decisions and by state and federal agencies to forecast yields and to identify areas that require drought assistance.

I plan to pursue extramural funding to implement the drought monitoring system in other regions of the United States and Canada. Opportunities exist to collaborate with both provincial and federal partners to enhance their respective drought monitoring programs. I am also interested in developing systems for other applications such as monitoring forest fire hazard and flash flooding risk.

The following links provide more information on this research:

Quiring, S. M. (2005) Developing a real-time Agricultural Drought Monitoring System for Delaware. Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Geography, University of Delaware.

Quiring, S. M. (2005) Developing a real-time Agricultural Drought Monitoring System for Delaware. Contributed paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Denver, CO, April 2005.

Quiring, S. M. (2004) Developing a real-time Agricultural Drought Monitoring System for Delaware using a geospatial framework. Contributed poster presented at the Delaware GIS 2004 Conference, Dover, DE, April 2004.

Quiring, S. M. (2004) Developing a real-time agricultural drought monitoring system for DELMARVA. Contributed paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Philadelphia, PA, March 2004.

Interview about doctoral research in UDaily

In addition to developing the agricultural drought monitoring system, I have also been involved in other drought monitoring research. I evaluated four commonly used measures of agricultural drought to determine which is the most suitable for quantifying and monitoring agricultural drought on the Canadian prairies (Quiring and Papakyriakou, 2003). This study demonstrated the importance of evaluating the performance of a number of drought indices prior to selecting the one that is most appropriate for a particular application. Future work will involve examining the utility of existing indices for other applications (e.g., forestry, water supply) and developing improved moisture indices.

The following links provide more information on this research:

Meng, L. and S. M. Quiring (in press) A Comparison of Soil Moisture Models Using Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) Observations. Journal of Hydrometeorology. doi: 10.1175/2008JHM916.1 http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1525-7541/preprint/2008/pdf/10.1175_2008JHM916.1.pdf

Principal Investigator: Texas Water Development Board, Drought Monitoring Index for Texas (11/01/05–10/31/06; $138,846); with J. Nielsen-Gammon (Co-PI), R. Srinivasan (Co-PI), T. Miller (Co-PI), and B. Narasimhan (Co-PI).

Quiring, S. M. and T. N. Papakyriakou (2003) An Evaluation of Agricultural Drought Indices for the Canadian Prairies. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 118, 49-62.