Monitoring droughts and impacts on the agricultural production: Examples from Spain

Droughts can have a substantial impact on the agriculture sector limiting the productivity of crops and leading to reduced yields. Recent droughts caused important economic losses in several areas of the world. In order to detect, monitor and forecast droughts at the continental scale the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) is developing the prototype of the European Drought Observatory (EDO). A multidisciplinary set of indicators is used within EDO to constantly monitor the various environmental components potentially affected by this hazard (soil, vegetation, etc.) to obtain a comprehensive and updated picture of the situation. In this paper, two indicators produced within EDO are compared with statistics about crop yields to evaluate the effects of drought events on the agricultural production. The test area is Spain, which has recently suffered from prolonged drought events. Results show that crop yields are significantly reduced in coincidence with drought events detected by the indicators.

ROSSI Simone;  NIEMEYER Stefan; 

2013-03-26

CIHEAM

JRC73838

2-85352-441-8,   

1016-121-X,   

http://ressources.ciheam.org/util/search/detail_article.php?id=00801322&langue=fr,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC73838,