Integrated drought monitoring approach: bringing diverse information into comprehensive drought monitoring system

Understanding the complexity of drought is crucial to convey improved information on drought situation to decision-makers and general public. Addressing this need by sharing drought data is challenging because it requires a common agreed framework that allows easy and seamless integration of data from different sources. This is also a challenge for Drought management centre for South-Eastern Europe (DMCSEE). In one of the most vulnerable regions to drought, according to the IPCC projections, drought-related damages have already had large impact on the economy and welfare. Trans-national integrated approach is therefore necessary for successful tracking of drought, comparing its impacts using common methodology and assessing vulnerability of various sectors. First step in building transnational integrated approach is to combine very diverse monitoring systems from technical perspective in one comprehensive drought monitoring system. In this regard, the EuroGEOSS (European answer to GEOSS - Global Earth Observation System of Systems) portends major benefits through various sharing mechanisms and gives access to services that can be linked together to process and generate new understandable knowledge and information (figure 1). Drought monitoring systems on different spatial levels can greatly benefit from integrated approach, proposed by the EuroGEOSS project. Benefits of interoperability arrangements and integrated monitoring for DMCSEE and European Drought Observatory (EDO) are presented in the article. Established infrastructure enables the use of information on various spatial levels (continental, regional and national). Technical solution enables the inclusion of very diverse drought monitoring systems from south-eastern Europe into EDO. Integrated drought monitoring system improves information on all essential levels (timing, intensity, duration and spatial extent of a specific drought episode) in the framework of existing polices and politics. The common infrastructure provides the setting for testing the interoperability between drought observatories, where successful achievements and issues for improvement can be identified. Further improvements of integrated monitoring approach in the frame of DMCSEE are foreseen through technical solutions for solving multilingual issues, discovering and visualizing information from different drought resources.