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
A returned map is loaded and returned.
5.1.4 Processing Step by Running Drought Indicators over a Selected Spatial
Domain
Step 02 is the process of processing current daily conditions using the drought indicator (“daily
soil moisture anomaly” and the display of the map within the browser on the local machine.
Step 02 determines whether there is a drought over a given spatial domain, as well as the
severity (ranking) of the drought. EDO utilizes a drought severity ranking system,
corresponding to drought of increasing severity: 1) 0-green; 2) 1-yellow; 3) 2-orange; 4) 3-red;
5) 4-brown. This is the drought severity ranking system that differs from the North American
Drought Monitor ranking system, as presented within Figure 5.
The currently displayed drought severity color coding system on the EDO map server
system does not yet implement this drought severity ranking system. It current system is
simpler, exhibiting wetter or drier conditions (than average) only: green (indicating wetter
conditions), yellow (indicating normal or 0), and orange for progressively drier, until red. 40
5.1.5 Automated Email Alerts and Drought Triggers
Scenario step 02.2
If any area within the European Union (including adjacent areas, such as Turkey) is
designated as having drought of a particular severity, an automated email alert can be sent to
decision makers, if they have already signed up to be a recipient for such an alert service. This is
the type of automated email alert system used by the USA National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) Integrated Coral reef Observing Network (ICON), which dispatches
automated emails to alert the oceanographic community of possible coral reef bleaching, when
pre-assigned bleaching thresholds are passed. The EuroGEOSS broker offers support for the
GeoRSS alert mechanism.
If, after being notified by email alert of a designated drought ranking, a decision maker
wants to retrieve more information about drought conditions, the semantics-supported advanced
search and discovery is set up to make it easier to retrieve the information. This is in keeping
with the philosophy of tailoring a decision support system to make it easier to utilize
information.
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