Drought Research Initiative

The Drought Research Initiative(DRI) was established to better understand the physical characteristics of and processes influencing Canadian Prairie droughts, and to contribute to their better prediction, through a focus on the recent severe drought that began in 1999 and largely ended in 2005. It is an interdisciplinary effort that involves 15 funded investigators from 6 Canadian universities and more than 20 collaborators from other universities and federal laboratories as well as partners from three provincial governments (Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan). DRI is achieving its objective by focusing on five complementary research themes, including quantification, understanding, prediction, comparisons with other droughts, and implications for society. Details beyond the scope of this entry can be found in Stewart et al. (2008) or on the DRI website

Drought is an anomaly within the atmospheric, surface and sub-surface cycling of water and energy, usually initiated through large to regional scale atmospheric processes, and enhanced and maintained through regional to local atmospheric, surface hydrology, land surface and groundwater feedbacks that operate throughout the annual cycle. Droughts are a distinctive feature of the Canadian Prairies where the large scale atmospheric circulations are influenced by blocking from intense orography to the west and long distances from all warm ocean-derived atmospheric water sources.
DRI addresses a multi-year drought that began in 1999 with cessation of its atmospheric component in 2004/2005 and many of its hydrological components in 2005. It was the worst drought for at least a hundred years in parts of the Canadian Prairies. According to Phillips (2002), for the western and central Canadian Prairies during 2001 and 2002, “… it was the worst of times. Even in the dust bowl of the 1930s, no single year between Medicine Hat, Kindersley and Saskatoon was drier than in 2001”. The drought affected agriculture, recreation, tourism, health, hydro-electricity, and forestry in the Prairies. Gross Domestic Product fell some $5.8 billion and employment losses exceeded 41,000 jobs for 2001 and 2002. This drought also contributed to a negative or zero net farm income for several provinces for the first time in 25 years (Statistics Canada, 2003) with agricultural production over Canada dropping an estimated $3.6 billion in 2001/2002. Previously reliable water supplies such as streams, wetlands, dugouts, reservoirs, and groundwater were placed under stress and often failed. More details are available in Wheaton (2005).
Despite the enormous economic, environmental, and societal impacts of droughts, DRI is undertaking the first integrated drought research program of its kind in Canada with the hope being that the occurrence and nature of drought can be better anticipated on short and long term scales. From a longer-term perspective, this 5-year Network represents an essential step in better predicting droughts over Canada, their detailed structure and their impacts with increasing confidence and better assessing whether there will be a ‘drying of the continental interior’ in the future

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