Drought control and resistance affect national food security. With this in mind, we studied five main grain-producing regions of China: Sanjiang Plain, Songnen Plain, Huang-Huai-Hai Plain, the middle Yangtze River and Jianghuai region and Sichuan Basin. Using GIS technology, we evaluated the comprehensive agricultural drought situation based on major crops, the basic drought resistance by integ...

Lack of access to insurance exacerbates the impact of climate variability on smallholder famers in Africa. Unlike traditional insurance, which compensates proven agricultural losses, weather index insurance (WII) pays out in the event that a weather index is breached. In principle, WII could be provided to farmers throughout Africa. There are two data-related hurdles to this. First, most farmer...

Agriculture is a sector easily affected by meteorological conditions. Crop yield reduction, even regional conflicts, may occur during a drought. It is extremely important to improve the state of our knowledge on agricultural drought risk. This study has proposed a new method (vulnerability surfaces) for assessing vulnerability quantitatively and continuously by including the environmental varia...

Understanding how precipitation inter-annually changes and its implication in agricultural drought and production change in winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) growth season is critical for crop production in China. MODIS Temperature-Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) and daily mean precipitation time series for the main growth season(Feb. to May) of winter wheat from 2000 to 2010 were used to ana...

The goal of the WMO Expert Meeting on Agricultural Drought Indices was to move forward in the selection of a single drought index that would be used worldwide in the assessment of agricultural drought and its severity. This chapter discusses the challenges in identifying a single index to accomplish this task. Given the complexities of drought and its diverse sectoral impacts, this is a formida...

Recent drought events in the United States and the magnitude of drought losses indicate the continuing vulnerability of the country to drought. Until recently, drought management in many states, including Nebraska, has been largely response oriented with little or no attention to mitigation and preparedness. In 1998, Nebraska began to revise its drought plan in order to place more emphasis on m...

Drought is a complex and highly destructive natural phenomenon that affects portions of the United States almost every year, and severe water deficiencies can often become catastrophic for agricultural production. Evapotranspiration (ET) by crops is an important component in the agricultural water budget; thus, it is advantageous to include ET in agricultural drought monitoring. The main object...

Understanding how precipitation inter-annually changes and its implication in agricultural drought and production change in winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) growth season is critical for crop production in China. MODIS Temperature-Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) and daily mean precipitation time series for the main growth season(Feb. to May) of winter wheat from 2000 to 2010 were used to ana...

The Barind region of Bangladesh suffers from frequent drought due to poor and delayed rainfall in pre monsoon and monsoon season. In the present study details analysis of rainfall data has been carried out for the years 1971-2010. Two well known drought indices, Standard precipitation index (SPI) has been used to evaluate the precipitation deficit, and Markov chain model used to quantify the dr...

Weather and climate events and agronomic enterprise are coupled via crop phenology and yield, which is temperature and precipitation dependent. Additional coupling between weather and climate and agronomic enterprise occurs through agricultural practices such as tillage, irrigation, erosion, livestock management, and forage. Thus, the relationship between precipitation, temperature, and yield i...