Drought Early Warning and Forecasting: Theory and Practice

Drought risk management involves three pillars: drought early warning, drought vulnerability and risk assessment, and drought preparedness, mitigation, and response. This book collects in one place a description of all the key components of the first pillar, and describes strategies for fitting these pieces together. The best modern drought early warning systems incorporate and integrate a broad array of environmental information sources: weather station observations, satellite imagery, land surface and crop model simulations, and weather and climate model forecasts, and analyze this information in context-relevant ways that take into account exposure and vulnerability. Drought Early Warning and Forecasting: Theory and Practice assembles a comprehensive overview of these components, providing examples drawn from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network and the United States Drought Monitor. This book simultaneously addresses the physical, social, and information management aspects of drought early warning, and informs readers about the tools, techniques, and conceptual models required to effectively identify, predict, and communicate potential drought-related disasters.

This book is a key text for postgraduate scientists and graduate and advanced undergraduate students in hydrology, geography, earth sciences, meteorology, climatology, and environmental sciences programs. Professionals dealing with disaster management and drought forecasting will also find this book beneficial to their work.

Describes and discusses the strategies and components used in effective and integrated 21st century drought early warning systemsProvides a one-stop-shop that describes in one book the observations, models, forecasts, indices, social context, and theory used in drought early warningIdentifies the latest tools and approaches used to monitor and forecast drought, sources of predictive skill, and discusses the technical and theoretical details required to use these tools and approaches in a real-world setting

1. Droughts, governance, disasters, and response systems 2. Drought early warning—definitions, challenges, and opportunities 3. Drought early warning systems 4. Tools of the trade 1—weather and climate forecasts 5. Tools of the trade 2—land surface models 6. Tools of the trade 3—mapping exposure and vulnerability 7. Theory—understanding atmospheric demand in a warming world 8. Theory—indices for measuring drought severity 9. Sources of drought early warning skill, staged prediction systems, and an example for Somalia 10. Practice—evaluating forecast skill 11. Practice—integrating observations and climate forecasts 12. Practice—actionable information and decision-making networks 13. Final thoughts