Drought monitoring, prediction and adaptation under climatic changes

The objective of this project was to develop a quantitative and operational system for nationwide drought monitoring and drought impact assessment for application in agriculture and water resources and environment in China using ESA, Chinese and other relevant satellite data as major data source in combination with other data (e.g. meteorological and drought statistics, etc.). An extension to drought prediction and adaptation to climate change had been made compared to the Dragon I drought monitoring project. In detail the project generated: (1) a preoperational real time drought monitoring and prediction system, (2) improved understanding of land surface processes and land-atmosphere interactions over different terrains (e.g. agriculture land, forest, Gobi desert, high plateau, polar environment), (3) algorithms for estimation of land surface parameters and heat fluxes, (4) assessment of economic loss caused by drought and adaptation measures under climatic change, (5) training of young scientists in the area of water, climate and environment. An operational system will be established by the China Meteorological Administration's National Meteorological Center (CMA/NMC) to provide information concerning the drought evolution situation and to support drought relief decision-making. We report on advances in retrievals of soil moisture using in-situ observations, satellite sensors and numerical modeling. The accuracy of available soil moisture products are assessed using in-situ data collected in the soil moisture monitoring networks developed for this and other projects. The use of these satellite retrievals in drought monitoring is demonstrated by analyzing the droughts in China and the generated drought assessment indices are compared to current practice by CMA.