Global drought impact monitoring system based on online media mining and participative data collection

Drought events are becoming one of the costliest phenomena under changing climate conditions, affecting almost every field of human activity and many ecosystems. Increasing severity and frequency of drought occurrence have led to the development of drought monitoring and predicting tools on both regional and global scales. Together with monitoring and analyzing drought risk and occurrence comes the necessity to monitor and evaluate single and multisectoral drought impacts. Aiming for early detection and a detailed description of drought impacts, we decided to design a system combining semi-automated online media scraping with a participative questionnaire accessible through Windy.com. Each week we perform an automatic search of media through automated scripts that are then read, evaluated, and sorted into impact categories and assigned geographic regions. The questionnaire allows users from around the world to describe drought impacts currently observed on the local scale. This method is unique in its combination of both regional impacts from media with direct inputs from volunteers worldwide, using a straightforward online questionnaire. The information from both sources is organized into seven impact categories (e.g., Agriculture, Wildfires, Business), and together they form an up-to-date global drought impact database that is visualized into drought impact maps. The spatiotemporal distribution of global drought impacts can then be compared with various drought indices and tools that characterize drought distribution and severity. After more than a year of active data collection in the system, we achieved a very good spatiotemporal match of reported impacts with drought events occurrence and severity (as observed by the SoilClim model). Compared to methods depending only on automated media analysis, our approach can get more detailed information from possibly underrepresented regions and create a comprehensive drought impact database.

Acknowledgement: This study was conducted with support of SustES - Adaptation strategies for sustainable ecosystem services and food security under adverse environmental conditions (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000797).