Utilizing Objective Drought Severity Thresholds to Improve Drought Monitoring

Objective Quantification of Drought Severity and Duration

Common weaknesses of current drought indexes were analyzed. First, most of the current indexes are not precise enough in detecting the onset, end, and accumulated stress of drought. Second, they do not effectively take into account the aggravating effects of runoff and evapotranspiration, which build up with time. Third, they have a limited usefulness in monitoring ongoing drought because they ...

Spatiotemporal Classification of Drought Severity

The growing number and effectiveness of earth observation satellite systems, along with the increasing reliability of remote sensing methodologies and techniques, present a wide range of new capabilities in monitoring and assessing droughts. In this paper, several drought features are analyzed and assessed by using remotely sensed Reconnaissance Drought Index (RDI). The developed methodology is...

Satellite Gravimetry Applied to Drought Monitoring

11.1 INTRODUCTION Near-surface wetness conditions change rapidly with the weather, which limits their usefulness as drought indicators. Deeper stores of water, including root-zone soil wetness and groundwater, portend longer-term weather trends and climate variations ; thus, they are well suited for quantifying droughts. However, the existing in situ networks for monitoring these variables suff...

Recent Advances in Drought Monitoring

Utilizing Humidity and Temperature Data to Advance Monitoring and Prediction of Meteorological Drought

The fraction of land area over the Continental United States experiencing extreme hot and dry conditions has been increasing over the past several decades, consistent with expectation from anthropogenic climate change. A clear concurrent change in precipitation, however, has not been confirmed. Vapor pressure deficit (VPD), combining temperature and humidity, is utilized here as an indicator of...