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Global Drought Monitoring Service through the GEOSS Architecture ...

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Architectural Implementation Pilot, Phase 3 Version: 2.0<br />

<strong>Global</strong> <strong>Drought</strong> <strong>Monitoring</strong> and European <strong>Drought</strong><br />

Observatory-Water SBA Engineering Report<br />

Date: 11/Feb/2011<br />

The same level of drought severity can cause a wide variety of drought impacts due to<br />

different underlying vulnerability of different regions. The multiple disciplinary information<br />

sources that assist decision makers in evaluating drought impacts include information on regional<br />

infrastructures, land use, residential water use, etc, which ei<strong>the</strong>r are impacted by drought or may<br />

mitigate drought severity (such as groundwater availability). Land use information (forage for<br />

pasture animals in agricultural lands), crop type information with crop growing seasons, power<br />

plant locations (for identifying cooling water requirements), groundwater springs (to identify<br />

area of groundwater export) are all different types of data that can be combined toge<strong>the</strong>r as<br />

“layers” within a Geographical Information System. The display of layers, one type of<br />

information on top of o<strong>the</strong>r layers, is <strong>the</strong> basis for <strong>the</strong> integration of multi-disciplinary<br />

information. Several types of multi-disciplinary data integration exist, and several tools were<br />

explored <strong>through</strong> testing for deployment for regional and global drought monitoring.<br />

3.2 Capturing User Requirements and Implementation of <strong>Architecture</strong> to Design<br />

of <strong>the</strong> <strong>Global</strong> <strong>Drought</strong> Monitor<br />

3.2.1 Portal Requirements: Drill-down capability<br />

Both <strong>the</strong> European <strong>Drought</strong> Observatory and <strong>the</strong> US NIDIS drought monitoring system<br />

portals support “drill down” capability from continental to national scale and from national scale<br />

to river basin scale. The spatial resolution of <strong>the</strong> drought maps are progressively higher, moving<br />

from global scale to continental scale to national scale and finally to river basin scale. This is not<br />

simply a matter of display preference, since a drought early warning system should be developed<br />

for local scales, particularly in <strong>the</strong> case of small-scale agricultural plots. Although existing<br />

national drought monitoring coverage (at its existing resolution) is incorporated into <strong>the</strong> GDMP,<br />

<strong>the</strong> GDMP is not simply <strong>the</strong> assembly of a collection of web page graphics into one location.<br />

3.2.2 Top-down versus bottom-up Design<br />

There are several possible candidates for designing a global drought monitoring service:<br />

1) a single, top-down system at coarse resolution; or 2) a single, top-down system at fine<br />

resolution; 3) a bottom-up system, or 4) a bottom-up system complemented with some top-down<br />

coverage where coverage is lacking.<br />

One example of a top-down global drought monitor is <strong>the</strong> University of College London<br />

<strong>Global</strong> <strong>Drought</strong> Monitor. 21 Ano<strong>the</strong>r is <strong>the</strong> Beijing Climate Center <strong>Drought</strong> Monitor. 22<br />

21<br />

http://drought.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/drought.html?map=%2Fwww%2Fdrought%2Fweb_pag<br />

es%2Fdrought.map&program=%2Fcgibin%2Fmapserv&root=%2Fwww%2Fdrought2%2F&map_web_imagepath=%2Ftmp<br />

%2F&map_web_imageurl=%2Ftmp%2F&map_web_template=%2Fdrought.html<br />

22 http://bcc.cma.gov.cn/Website/index.php?ChannelID=82&show_product=1<br />

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