Global Drought Monitoring Service through the GEOSS Architecture ...

Architectural Implementation Pilot, Phase 3 Version: 2.0
Global Drought Monitoring and European Drought
Observatory-Water SBA Engineering Report
Date: 11/Feb/2011
2.7.1.1 Integration of Republic of Argentina SMN Drought Coverage into the
Global Drought Monitor
Users should be able to access the Global Drought Monitor from anywhere on the World
Wide Web and see the drought coverage for their respective countries in the form that they see it
and utilize it within their native countries. Yet, at the same time, the methodology that is
identifying droughts over Brasil or Paraguay should be able to identify droughts, if they are
present, over Argentina, as well. Hence, some standardization of drought indicators is required,
since one of the objectives of Global Drought Monitoring is to improve the accuracy with which
drought is being recorded all over the planet.
One approach is to find a proportional relationship between the range of the
drought indicator used in the native country and the drought severity range, either used by the
US National Drought Mitigation Center or by EDO, as illustrated in Figures 5 and 6. The
drought severity ranking system employed by the North American Drought Monitor was
developed by the USA University of Nebraska Lincoln. This system has a colorized code which
is linked to Standardized Precipitation Index (Figure 5). Figure 5 (a) and (b) compare the
National Drought Mitigation Center drought severity ranking system with the drought severity
ranking system employed by the European Drought Observatory. Eventually, the two systems
will have to be linked (or made interoperable).
Page 27