Drought Monitoring and Drought Prediction in China Using Remote Sensing, Land Surface Models (lsm) and Data Assimilation: Preliminary Results of the Loess Plateau Field Experiment in 2005 (lopex05)

The Dragon project “drought monitoring and drought prediction” will be used to develop a system to monitor and generate predictions of the soil moisture conditions in the root zone. The methodology that will be employed is based on the direct assimilation of satellite observation in a land surface modeling framework. The advantage of this methodology is that physically based methods can be used as compared to (semi-) empirical direct-retrieval algorithms.