Towards a global drought monitoring, forecasting and projection capability

The impacts from drought are perhaps the highest among all natural disasters. In the United States there are a number of efforts to improve the monitoring and forecasting of drought, in part to improve the ability to provide information for improved coping and management of drought. Globally, activities under the Group of Earth Observations (GEO) and the World Climate Research Programme have activities related to improved monitoring and forecasting of drought with the goal of a Global Drought Information System (GDIS). This seminar will present an overview of drought research being carried out by the speaker’s research group on the monitoring, forecasting and future projection of drought. Central to this is the research strategy of seamless timeline for such an analysis that extends from historical analysis through 21C climate projections. This work will include recent work on understanding drought mechanisms to further understand drought on-set and recovery within the climate system as well as and the deficiencies of forecast models to predict these well. The seminar will also present the development of our African and Latin American monitoring and forecasting systems (http://stream.princeton.edu), which is being extended to a global drought system, and the development of low-cost environmental sensors that communicate via the cell phone networks for deployment in Africa to strengthen the observational basis for flood and drought monitoring.