Abstract
The Georgia General Assembly, like many states, has enacted pre-defined, comprehensive, drought-mitigation apparatus, but they need rainfall outlooks. Global circulation models (GCMs) provide rainfall outlooks, but they are too spatially course for jurisdictional impact assessment. To wed these efforts, spatially averaged, time-smoothed, daily precipitation observations from the National Weather Service cooperative network are fitted to eight points of 700 mbar atmospheric data from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project for climate downscaling and drought prediction in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin. The domain is regionalized with a factor analysis to create specialized models. All models complied well with mathematical assumptions, though the residuals were somewhat skewed and flattened. All models had an R-squared > 0.2. The models revealed map points to the south to be especially influential. A leave-one-out cross-validation showed the models to be unbiased with a percent error of < 20%. Atmospheric parameters are estimated for 2008–2011 with GCMs and empirical extrapolations. The transfer function was invoked on both these data sets for drought predictions. All models and data indicate drought especially for 2010 and especially in the south.
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