Near-real time hydrological drought monitoring in the European Drought Observatory

A near-real time hydrological drought monitoring index, as recently implemented within the European Drought Observatory (EDO, http://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu) is described. This index takes advantage of daily discharge data simulated by the Lisflood model to capture the dynamic nature of the drought phenomenon. Drought events are defined as prolonged periods in which the discharge values fall below a defined threshold, and the probability of occurrence of the total water deficit, compared to historical events, is used as measure of the severity of the drought. A daily-changing threshold is adopted for each modelling cell in order to account for the different hydrological regimes observed across the European domain. In this paper, the theoretical concept behind the indicator and its operational implementation in the EDO web portal are described. The proposed drought index demonstrated a good capability to capture the major drought events reported in the European Drought Reference (EDR) database (http://www.geo.uio.no/edc/droughtdb/) since 1995, including the most recent drought that occurred during summer 2015 in Central Europe [Cammalleri et al. 2016; Hydrol. Sci. J., doi10.1080/02626667.2016.1240869]. In its current implementation, the index allows for a continuous monitoring of hydrological droughts of the major river basins (drainage area > 1,000 km2) in the pan-European domain.

CAMMALLERI Carmelo;  VOGT Juergen;  SALAMON Peter; 

2017-07-19

European Water Resources Association

JRC105782

http://ewra2017.ewra.net/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC105782,