Ranch-Scale Drought Monitoring Tools for Arizona

Abstract

Drought can impact ranching operations in numerous ways from directly reducing seasonally available water and forage to increasing wildfire risk and causing long-term impacts to rangelands. Monitoring weather and climate across a ranch can be a useful management tool when coupled with a detailed drought mitigation plan to anticipate impacts and trigger adaptive management decisions such as changing your grazing rotation schedule or in extreme circumstances, culling decisions (Tolleson 2016). Assessing drought conditions in the southwest U.S. is challenging because there are few long-term climate monitoring stations, especially in rural and remote areas, and monsoon rains can be very localized.