Contact: James Carskadon STARKVILLE, Miss.—When Krzysztof Raczynski was working on his master’s degree in his native country of Poland, he was enthused to see a large waterfall during a trip to the Tatra mountains. However, when he arrived, Raczynski discovered the waterfall had run dry amid an ongoing drought in the region. “That’s when I started thinking in a broader perspective about droughts, and as I continued with my Ph.D., I started studying the trigger points for droughts and how they interact with the environment,” said Raczynski, now an assistant research professor at Mississippi State University’s Geosystems Research Institute with the GEO Project. Raczynski is developing new tools and strategies for predicting flood and drought levels, particularly in the Southeast U.S. He said there are some more or less known patterns of drought and flood event distribution in historic data, but how those patterns will continue amid a changing climate remains to be seen. Using streamflow data from the National Water Model and several other key data sets, he is developing the models to support better prediction of drought and flood in changing conditions. “If we can predict those patterns, we can better mitigate and adapt to climate change and its hydrological impacts,” Raczynski said. “For example, when it rains a lot, there are techniques to collect that water, store it and then use it during the dry periods. The question is, how long will we need to store it? I am trying to figure out those flood and drought patterns in order to answer those questions and hopefully help communities better manage their water.” Krzysztof Raczynski (Photo by Grace Cockrell) Raczynski came to MSU in 2021 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Northern Gulf Institute, where he spent most of his time developing the Harmonic Oscillator Seasonal-Trend, or […]