Development of a drought monitor for South-Asia

South Asia (SA) is highly vulnerable to extreme climatic events and experiences a wide range of natural hazards such as floods, drought, storms, and sea-level rise.  Droughts are recurrent in SA and its impact on regional agriculture, food storage, and livelihood is enormous. Agricultural droughts have severe consequences on the economy, society, health and water resources sectors. In this work, a state-of-the-art monitoring system of soil moisture drought in SA is developed. This study aims at improving the agricultural drought monitoring system for SA and contributing towards better adaptation solutions in the region. The SA drought monitoring system is inspired by the German Drought Monitor (www.ufz.de/duerremonitor)[1]. First, we implement the mesoscale hydrologic model (mHM, https://git.ufz.de/mhm) to reconstruct daily soil moisture from 1981 to 2019 using a near-real-time precipitation product (CHIRPS version 2, 0.25-degree resolution). Second, the SMI is estimated with a non-parametric kernel-based cumulative distribution function [2] based on mHM’s historic soil moisture reconstruction. The generated SMI maps are classified into five classes based on severity: abnormally dry, moderate drought, severe drought, extreme drought and exceptional drought. Third, we develop the South Asia Drought Monitor (SADM) which is an interactive web-portal (http://southasiadroughtmonitor.pythonanywhere.com/) for the dissemination of the simulated near-real-time drought classes. To achieve maximum dissemination, the daily and monthly SMI fields will be uploaded and published on the SADM portal. The SADM will help to inform decision-makers, the general public, researchers, and stakeholders in the SA. The drought monitoring system will allow the scientific community to conduct micro-level in-depth research and to enable policymakers to formulate proper planning and to take mitigation measures in sectors encompassing energy, health, forestry, and agriculture at local to regional scales.

 

[1] Zink, M., Samaniego, L., Kumar, R., Thober, S., Mai, J., Schäfer, D., Marx, A., 2016: The German drought monitor, Environ. Res. Lett. 11 (7), art. 074002, DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/7/074002.

[2] Samaniego, L., Kumar, R. and Zink, M.,2013: Implications of Parameter Uncertainty on Soil Moisture Drought Analysis in Germany, Journal of Hydrometeorology, DOI: 10.1175/JHM-D-12-075.1.