By Linda Welzenbach Fries
Noemi Vergopolan, assistant professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Rice University, has been awarded the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The five-year, $938,000 grant will support her research to establish DroughtRx, an experimental, high-resolution drought monitoring and forecasting system for the continental United States.
The NSF CAREER award recognizes young academic leaders who effectively integrate groundbreaking research with educational leadership and community outreach. Unlike traditional three-year grants, the CAREER award provides sustained funding to execute ambitious, high-risk/high-reward scientific visions.
"The CAREER is about big ideas and research vision," Vergopolan said. "If I had submitted this to other agencies with typical three-year grants, this type of work would be hard to accomplish in such a short time frame. It's nice to see that NSF recognizes the value of the proposed work and sees its potential impact.”
A central strength of the project is its balance between fundamental scientific discovery and actionable decision-making. By demonstrating that coarse-resolution hydrological models miss local scale droughts due to spatial averaging, Vergopolan highlights the distinction between broad regional generalizations and the need for detailed information to capture real-world agricultural impacts.
"Drought has always been studied as a large-scale event... because we never had the data and tools up to this point to look into droughts as a fine-scale local process," Vergopolan explained. "If you look at coarser resolutions, you lose the extremes and can fail to detect drought. The goal of my research is to look at drought from a local scale perspective and be able to capture the underlying processes that we are missing."
Vergopolan’s 'DroughtRx' Vision
Droughts are traditionally analyzed as broad, regional events, largely because existing satellite sensors and land models operate at coarse spatial resolutions (often 25 to 50 kilometers). However, water movement in soils can change rapidly across short distances. DroughtRx redefines drought assessment by providing daily, 30-meter resolution of soil moisture estimates and predictions.
The DroughtRx framework combines a range of data types and scales from microwave and radar satellites to map topsoil moisture down to detailed 30-meter field views. Because satellites can only scan the very surface layer of the soil, the framework uses AI guided by physical laws of water movement to calculate how moisture propagates into deeper root zones.
By analyzing these satellite patterns over time, the system learns how water flows through specific soils so that it can be used to fine-tune computer models and improve future drought forecasts. This detailed approach helps reveal localized, field-level droughts that typical wide-scale regional monitors completely miss.
Vergopolan plans to extend DroughtRx beyond campus laboratories through extensive external partnerships and public engagement. These will be developed through citizen science integration and partnerships with real-world stakeholders.
“We hope to engage with the University of Nebraska Drought Mitigation Center and BCarbon Rice-affiliated program stakeholders and their farmer and rancher network,” explains Vergopolan. “While we look to understand drought conditions now, we want to go beyond just coping with drought. DroughtRx can help them better manage their resources, from when to graze cattle to preserve grass and soil, or the optimal time to irrigate. Ultimately, we want to improve how we manage our water resources for the future.”
Partnering with Rice’s Center for Research Computing (CRC), the resulting DroughtRx products will be accessed through an interactive, public-facing dashboard where land managers, agricultural producers, and water resources officials can view real-time local conditions and outlooks.
In alignment with the NSF CAREER mission, Drought Rx integrates comprehensive educational initiatives, including summer research experiences for undergraduate students (Rice OURI and NSF REU), Rice Center for STEM Engagement (RSTEM) K-12 teacher professional development in geospatial data science and remote sensing concepts, and public outreach activities such as workshops, science seminars, and interactive demonstrations.
“It’s innovation. It's a new thing that we don't have. It's about people and how they interact with these tools to make them also part of the design process,” Vergopolan shares.
Through DroughtRx, Vergopolan’s team is building the foundation for the next generation of U.S. drought monitoring—empowering both local agricultural communities and national decisionmakers with high-precision, AI-driven climate and water intelligence.