Remote Sensing Drought Indicators Within the European Drought Observatory

The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) is setting up a prototype of a European Drought Observatory (EDO) for drought detection, monitoring, and forecasting in Europe. EDO employs set of indicators monitoring the various environmental features affected by this hazard (precipitation, soil moisture, vegetation status, etc.). As for Remote Sensing, the operational production of two indicators (NDWI and fAPAR) has been implemented so far. The NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) is a spectral index which reflects changes in the water content of vegetation canopies. The fAPAR (Fraction of absorbed photosynthetic active radiation) is an indicator of the state and photosynthetic activity of vegetation and is sensitive to the consequences of water stresses. Other drought indicators and their forecasts, such as the SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index) and soil moisture estimations from hydrological modeling, are regularly produced within EDO. All the data are available online on a Mapserver-based architecture.

ROSSI Simone;  WEISSTEINER Christof;  NIEMEYER Stefan; 

2010-01-22

Omni-Press

JRC52457

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC52457,