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
1.2 Importance of Global Drought Monitoring as a Critical Earth Concern and a
Prime Activity for GEO
Given current concerns with the increasing frequency and magnitude of droughts in many
regions of the world, especially in the light of expected climate change, drought monitoring and
dissemination of early warning information in a timely fashion is a critical concern. The
European Union experienced intense drought and heat waves in 2003, Argentina in 2008/2009,
southeast Australia in 2009, while, at the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) climate projections for the 21 st century suggests an increased frequency of severe
droughts in continental USA and Mexico, Mediterranean Basin, parts of northern China,
Southern Africa, Australia, and parts of South America. In addition, current agricultural
production is being maintained by multiple crop cycles over the course of a single year in India
and China, for example, and drought is exhausting secondary supplies of groundwater , as the
drought exhausts surface water supplies, creating a dependency upon the groundwater sources
needed to maintain these multiple crop cycles.
Droughts and famine are inseparable from one another: droughts lower agricultural
production. Current agricultural monitoring efforts, such as the European Union (EU)
Monitoring of Agricultural Resources with Remote Sensing (MARS Food-Sec), the USA
Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service, and the Famine Early Warning
System (FEWSNET) have developed methodologies for estimating the impact of drought upon
agricultural production, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Water
Requirements Satisfaction Index (WRSI)(as renamed Global Water Satisfaction Index by MARS
and GeoWRSI by FEWSNET). The MARS convention implies that a WRSI or GWSI of 50
represents a famine condition (actual evapotranspiration of half the plant water requirement).
Advances in Land Surface Modeling, as in more sophisticated representation of soil
water process, including linkage of groundwater with surface water, is just one way in which
new technologies are available to upgrade the more schematic soil water balances incorporated
within WRSI. Additional new technologies are coming online with respect to satellite-based soil
moisture sensors. Standardization of global meteorological datasets has permitted the running
Land Surface Models and distributed hydrological models in near-real-time (NRT). IT
infrastructure and informatics methodologies, combined with all these scientific advances, have
now created the opportunity to develop a more up-to-date, comprehensive, useful-to-decision
making drought monitoring capability. Additional advances in web-based, real-time (RT)
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with supporting distributed databases (Wangmutitakul,
et. al., 2003; Wang 2005; Chalainanont, et. al. 2007 or web map services in time-critical
applications (Zhang and Li 2005; Ozdilik and Seker).
The role that GEO plays in this process is to provide a rich collaborative environment,
fostering collaboration among the USA, Canada, European Community, Asia, Australia, and
South America.
1.3 Identification of Starting Conditions Fostering Drought is not straightforward
Page 9