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
Step 01 within the European Drought Observatory is equivalent to providing with users
the ability to select one of multiple drought indicators. EDO makes available to users the choice
of Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), Soil Moisture, Soil Moisture Anomaly, and several remote
sensing-based measures of vegetation health, such as fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetic Active
Radiation (fAPAR) in the case of EDO and VegDRI in the case of NIDIS (over the USA). The
GDMP does not yet have the extensive development to support independent display of multiple
drought indicators and indices. As noted above, SPI is already being displayed on the “Current
Conditions” map.
Step 02 is the processing loop of taking the selected drought indicator, running the indicator over
a selected spatial domain or region, and then returning a republished map which displays the
level of drought intensity or severity within this area (if drought is present at all). The current
GDMP configuration displays the integrated drought severity ranking system of Figure 5 for
North America and the integrated drought severity ranking system deployed by EDO for the
European Community. (A drought severity ranking system is being developed for Africa and is
not yet deployed. The Figure 5 system can be adapted to soil moisture percentiles, which is a
drought indicator within the Princeton African Drought Monitor system). Under the current
system, users would have to drill down to the North American Drought Monitor and from there
to the USA, Canada, or Mexico, in order to select individual drought indicators, such as those on
display on the NIDIS portal. Drought Indicators are made available on the NIDIS site. 32
SPI may not be an adequate drought indicator for semiarid areas, such as areas where
sources of water may be water crossing a national boundary from a snowmelt runoff mountain
zone (like Central Asia), or areas where complicated moisture fluxes within the vadose zone may
reverse direction and return back to the surface. The North American map currently displays
drought zones using the National Drought Mitigation Center drought severity ranking system
shown in Figure 5(a), while EDO deploys the “indicator” alert system shown in Figure 5(b).
4.3.2 Layout and Organization of the GDMP within the NIDIS GIS Server
The home page (index page) of the NIDIS portal is accessible from the World Wide
Web. 33 Underneath the NIDIS banner, “US Drought Portal” is a list of subcategories: “Home,”
“What is NIDIS,” “Current Drought,” “Forecasting,” etc. The URL for “current drought,” 34 the
URL for “forecasting” 35 show the navigation within the portal: the category item is located in the
32 http://www.drought.gov/portal/server.pt/community/drought_indicators/223
33 http://www.drought.gov/portal/server.pt/community/drought.gov/202
34 http://www.drought.gov/portal/server.pt/community/current_drought/208
35 http://www.drought.gov/portal/server.pt/community/forecasting/209
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