Drought affects virtually all regions of the world and results in significant economic, social, and environmental impacts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates annual drought-related losses in the U.S. at $6--$8 billion, which is more than any other natural hazard. Congress enacted the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 to encourage the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Risk Management Agency (RMA) and farmers to be more proactive in managing drought risk.

Drought is a complex natural hazard that is best characterized by multiple climatological and hydrological parameters. Improving our understanding of the relationships between these parameters is necessary to reduce the impacts of drought. Data mining is a recently developed technique that can be used to interact with large databases and assist in the discovery of associations between drought and oceanic data by extracting information from massive and multiple data archives.In this study, a new data-mining algorithm [i.e., Minimal Occurrences With Constraints and Time Lags (MOWCATL)] has been used to identify the relationships between oceanic parameters and drought indices. Rather than using traditional global statistical associations, the algorithm identifies drought episodes separate from normal and wet conditions and then uses drought episodes to find time-lagged relationships with oceanic parameters. As with all association-based data-mining algorithms, MOWCATL is used to find existing relationships in the data, and is not by itself a prediction tool.Using the MOWCATL algorithm, the analyses of the rules generated for selected stations and state-averaged data for Nebraska from 1950 to 1999 indicate that most occurrences of drought are preceded by positive values of the Southern Oscillation index (SOI), negative values of the multivariate ENSO index (MEI), negative values of the Pacific–North American (PNA) index, negative values of the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO), and negative values of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The frequency and confidence of the time-lagged relationships between oceanic indices and droughts at the selected stations in Nebraska indicate that oceanic parameters can be used as indicators of drought in Nebraska.

Gamification in education presents a number of benefits that can theoretically facilitate higher engagement and motivation among students when learning complex, technical concepts. As an innovative, high-potential educational tool, many educators and researchers are attempting to implement more effective gamification into undergraduate coursework. Cyber Security Operations (CSO) education is no exception. CSO education traditionally requires comprehension of complex concepts requiring a high level of technical and abstract thinking. By properly applying gamification to complex CSO concepts, engagement in students should see an increase. While an increase is expected, no comprehensive study of CSO gamification applications (GA) has yet been undertaken to fully synthesize the use and outcomes of existing implementations. To better understand and explore gamification in CSO education, a deeper analysis of current gamification applications is needed. This research outlines and conducts a methodical, comprehensive literature review using the Systematic Mapping Study process to identify implemented and evaluated GAs in undergraduate CSO education. This research serves as both a comprehensive repository and synthesis of existing GAs in cybersecurity, and as a starting point for further CSO GA research. With such a review, future studies can be undertaken to better understand CSO GAs. A total of 74 papers were discovered which evaluated GAs undergraduate CSO education, through literature published between 2007 and June 2022. Some publications discussed multiple GAs, resulting in a total of 80 undergraduate CSO GAs listing at https://bit.ly/3S260GS. The study outlines each GA identified and provides a short overview of each GA. It also provides a summary of engagement-level characteristics currently exhibited in existing CSO education GAs and discusses common themes and findings discovered in the course of the study.