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...

Drought is one of the most destructive natural disasters causing serious damages to human society, and studies have projected more severe and widespread droughts in the coming decades associated with the warming climate. Although several drought indices have been developed for drought monitoring, most of them were based on large scale environmental conditions rather than ecosystem transitional ...

The standard suite of indicators currently used in operational drought monitoring reflects anomalous conditions in several major components of the hydrologic budget—representing deficits in precipitation, soil moisture content, runoff, surface and groundwater storage, snowpack, and streamflow. In principle, it is useful to have a diversity of indices because drought can assume many forms (meteo...

Drought is a major environmental disaster in many parts of the world. Knowledge about the timing, severity and extentof drought can aid planning and decision-making. Drought indices derived from in-situ meteorological data have coarsespatial and temporal resolutions, thus, obtaining a real-time drought condition over a large area is difficult. This studyused advanced very high resolution radiom...

Agricultural drought, a common phenomenon in most parts of the world, is one of the most challenging natural hazards to monitor effectively. Land surface water index (LSWI), calculated as a normalized ratio between near infrared (NIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR), is sensitive to vegetation and soil water content. This study examined the potential of a LSWI-based, drought-monitoring algorithm...

Drought is a climate phenomenon which might occur in any climate condition and all regions on the earth. Effective drought management depends on the application of appropriate drought indices. Drought indices are variables which are used to detect and characterize drought conditions. In this study, it was tried to predict drought occurrence, based on the standard precipitation index (SPI), usin...

Drought is a naturally occurring event that is associated with virtually all climatic regions. Given its slow onset and other characteristics, including its spatial dimensions and duration, impacts are difficult to assess and have been, historically, poorly documented. These impacts are strongly influenced by a society’s exposure to the hazard and the vulnerability of that society to the hazard...