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
However, there are good reasons for embarking upon a bottom-up system. A global top
down system can imply that drought is present within a local area, although the local area might
be drought-free due to availability of secondary sources of water such as groundwater. Having
participation of members who are familiar with local conditions on the ground is invaluable in
setting up a global drought monitoring system. A global network of national
hydrometeorological service and ministry-based drought experts can provide the expertise to
carry out retrospective validations of drought forecasts, along with fine tuning of the drought
forecasting system, part of the life cycle by which “experimental” (research stage product)
becomes “operational.”
Drought monitoring and forecasting is intended for applications. For example soil
moisture monitoring and forecasting can support farmers’ activities. Since the size of farms may
vary, a drought early warning system is best applied at local scales. This means that a coarsescale
system may not be very valuable for providing decision support. A drill down system is
built upon a combined bottom up-top down system, in which the highest resolution drought maps
of the system, i.e., those at river basin scale or national scale can be used for drought early
warning applications or used for agricultural support.
3.2.3 Soil Moisture and Agricultural Drought Monitoring Requirement
Given the importance of soil moisture in agricultural drought monitoring, and the
importance of agriculture in the world food problem, remote sensing-based and modeled-based
soil moisture should be utilized within the system.
3.2.4 Republication of information to help decision makers facilitate drought
decision making
Integrating together multiple disciplinary and cross-disciplinary information, such as
drought severity information and agricultural production data, require different informatics
strategies to carry out such integration. While layers can be added together and removed within
a Geographic Information System (GIS), more sophisticated tools are required in order to
assemble all of the information in a form that can be immediately used for decision making. As
noted by Lemon et. al (2010): “The ‘Discover, Display, and Download’ Use Case has misled us.
No one simply wants to find, look at, and collect data. To the contrary, they all want to do
something with the data: subject it to some analysis, make a map, or prepare a basis for making
rapid decisions.” Search and discovery alone will not make GEOSS a viable system, valuable to
end users: its information has to be repackaged into a user-friendly form that provides
application knowledge and accelerates decision making.
3.2.5 Hydrologic Drought Monitoring for Semi-Arid Areas and Meeting
Hydrologic Drought User Requirement through Semantics
The hydrologic drought indicator user requirement creates a need for assembling
information on water budget components, such as groundwater, streamflow, precipitation, soil
water, snow cover, etc. The sheer volume of information, particularly if assembled over large
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