Drought is a recurrent feature of climate and can affect areas with different climate regimes and human activities. Its impacts depend on the duration, intensity and extent of precipitation deficiency and water demand for several purposes. Due to the complexity of this phenomenon, it is crucial to analyze both current conditions and evolution of a drought event in order to provide accurate, timely and affordable support for policy setting and impacts management. LaMMA Consortium and IBIMET-CNR Institute are developed an operational system for drought monitoring and medium-long time forecasts in Tuscany region (Central Italy) and actually they are verifying the possibility to extend the framework over the whole Italian territory, in order to deliver periodical, timely, affordable, geo-referenced information about areas affected by an increasing reduction of available water resources. Method The coupled rainfall based and satellite derived monitoring system, consisting of a set of direct and indirect indices, will allow the assessment of vegetation moisture and temperature conditions at different spatio-temporal scales. An analysis of vegetation performances related to temperature and moisture stress is made throughout Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) anomalies and Vegetation Health Index (VHI), derived from the Terra-MODIS satellite products, available since 2000 and updated each 16 days with a final spatial resolution of 1km. Due to the increasing of cloud cover during colder seasons, NDVI anomalies and VHI maps will be produced only during the growing season (spring-summer). From a climatic point of view, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Effective Drought Index (EDI) are selected, due to their characteristic of providing multiple time scale drought occurrence and duration. Precipitation data required to calculate the two indices come from daily gridded precipitation datasets of the ECA&D (European Climate Assessment & Dataset - EOBS) and the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS). Moreover these datasets provide the base for seasonal outlooks of drought evolution. Forecasts of the next 1-3 months follow a physically-based statistical approach based on an "adaptive multi-regressive method" that takes into account potential predictors among a list of physical atmospheric indices and Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies. Information about current condition and future evolution of a drought event will be periodically uploaded into an Open Source WebGIS platform. This comprehensive framework can represent a quasi-real time and user-friendly web application multi-purpose operational climate service for final users, potentially able to give "easy to read" information useful for managing drought-related emergencies as crop yields losses, forest fires and water resources reduction. For furthers information concerning the operational system see R. Magno, L. Angeli, M. Chiesi, and M. Pasqui "Prototype of a drought monitoring and forecasting system for the Tuscany region" Advances in Science and Research. 11: 7-10, 2014.
Implementation of a national drought monitoring and forecasting system
R Magno;T De Filippis;E Di Giuseppe;M Pasqui;L Rocchi;F Zabini
2015
Abstract
Drought is a recurrent feature of climate and can affect areas with different climate regimes and human activities. Its impacts depend on the duration, intensity and extent of precipitation deficiency and water demand for several purposes. Due to the complexity of this phenomenon, it is crucial to analyze both current conditions and evolution of a drought event in order to provide accurate, timely and affordable support for policy setting and impacts management. LaMMA Consortium and IBIMET-CNR Institute are developed an operational system for drought monitoring and medium-long time forecasts in Tuscany region (Central Italy) and actually they are verifying the possibility to extend the framework over the whole Italian territory, in order to deliver periodical, timely, affordable, geo-referenced information about areas affected by an increasing reduction of available water resources. Method The coupled rainfall based and satellite derived monitoring system, consisting of a set of direct and indirect indices, will allow the assessment of vegetation moisture and temperature conditions at different spatio-temporal scales. An analysis of vegetation performances related to temperature and moisture stress is made throughout Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) anomalies and Vegetation Health Index (VHI), derived from the Terra-MODIS satellite products, available since 2000 and updated each 16 days with a final spatial resolution of 1km. Due to the increasing of cloud cover during colder seasons, NDVI anomalies and VHI maps will be produced only during the growing season (spring-summer). From a climatic point of view, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Effective Drought Index (EDI) are selected, due to their characteristic of providing multiple time scale drought occurrence and duration. Precipitation data required to calculate the two indices come from daily gridded precipitation datasets of the ECA&D (European Climate Assessment & Dataset - EOBS) and the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS). Moreover these datasets provide the base for seasonal outlooks of drought evolution. Forecasts of the next 1-3 months follow a physically-based statistical approach based on an "adaptive multi-regressive method" that takes into account potential predictors among a list of physical atmospheric indices and Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies. Information about current condition and future evolution of a drought event will be periodically uploaded into an Open Source WebGIS platform. This comprehensive framework can represent a quasi-real time and user-friendly web application multi-purpose operational climate service for final users, potentially able to give "easy to read" information useful for managing drought-related emergencies as crop yields losses, forest fires and water resources reduction. For furthers information concerning the operational system see R. Magno, L. Angeli, M. Chiesi, and M. Pasqui "Prototype of a drought monitoring and forecasting system for the Tuscany region" Advances in Science and Research. 11: 7-10, 2014.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
