Medium Resolution Spectral Imager (MERSI) on board the new Generation Polar-Orbiting Meteorological Satellite of China (FY-3) has five spectral channels with 250m spatial resolution, which enhances the ability to observe fine surface features and provides a new data source for drought monitoring in large area. Drought status of north China is evaluated using FY-3A/MERSI satellite data with Perp...

Efforts to monitor the broad-scale impacts of drought on forests often come up short. Drought is a direct stressor of forests as well as a driver of secondary disturbance agents, making a full accounting of drought impacts challenging. General impacts can be inferred from moisture deficits quantified using precipitation and temperature measurements. However, derived meteorological indices may n...

Based on the national precipitation dataset in the Huang-Huai-Hai River Basin of China for the 1961–2011 period, the China-Z growing season index was calculated to analyze the characteristics of the evolution of meteorological droughts. Data from statistical droughts (the droughts which are defined and classified by the actual statistic data) were compared with those of meteorological droughts ...

Drought is a stochastic natural hazard that is instigated by intense and persistent shortage of precipitation. Following an initial meteorological phenomenon, subsequent impacts are realized on agriculture and hydrology. Among the natural hazards, droughts possess certain unique features; in addition to delayed effects, droughts vary by multiple dynamic dimensions including severity and duratio...

The paper describes a new software package for automated estimation, display and analyses of various drought indices – continuous functions of precipitation that allow quantitative assessment of meteorological drought events to be made. The software at present allows up to five different drought indices to be estimated. They include the Decile Index (DI), the Effective Drought Index (EDI), the ...

Drought is one of the most damaging environmental phenomena. In general, drought is a temporal reduction of environmental moisture status relative to the mean state. Because of the complexity of drought, it is often studied only by separate aspects of the phenomenon (e.g. meteorological drought, soil drought, etc.). Hence, approaches to drought identification are variable. The theory of drought...