RevolutionaryWay2176

You use the terms "short-term" and "near-term" - what are the scales of these terms both temporally and spatially? Since a weather forecast is pretty unreliable more than 5 days out for a given region, it seems that an ecological forecast would have an even larger problem with reliability at a scale smaller than months for 100s of square miles.

The final point is a really good one. It raises another question for me that's kind of related - the increasing intensity of precipitation events due to climate change blurs the actual status of a region as being in drought conditions. For example, here in the Midwest, we have had weeks of dryness punctuated by a rainfall event of an inch or more. This "erases" the drought condition even though much of the event runs off instead of infiltrating so that soil moisture is still in deficit.

Just something that I've noticed that could be relevant to your modeling (that I imagine you've already thought of :) ).