A Simple Drought Product and Indicator Derived from Temperature and Relative Humidity Observed by the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS)

In the United States, drought results in agricultural losses, impacts to industry, power and energy production, natural resources, municipal water supplies and human health making it one of the costliest natural hazards in the nation. Monitoring drought is therefore critical to help local governments, resource managers, and other groups make effective decisions, yet there is no single definition of drought, and because of the complex nature of drought there is no universal best drought indicator. Remote sensing applications in drought monitoring are advantageous due to the large spatial and temporal frequency of observations, leading to a better understanding of the spatial extent of drought and its duration, and in detecting the onset of drought and its intensity. NASA Earth Observing System (EOS)-era data have potential for monitoring and assessing drought and many are already used either directly or indirectly for drought monitoring. Land Surface Temperature (LST) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) sensor are widely used for agricultural and environmental plant-stress monitoring via the USDM, the VegDRI project and FEWSNet. However there remain underutilized sources of information from NASA satellite observations that may have promise for characterizing and understanding meteorological drought. Once such sensor is NASA's Advanced Infra-Red Sounder (AIRS) aboard the Aqua satellite. AIRS and it's sister sensor the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) that together provide meteorological information of high relevance to meteorological drought, e.g., profiles of water vapor, surface air temperature, and precipitation. Recent work undertaken to develop simple indicators of drought based on temperature and relative humidity from the AIRS suite of instruments is promising. Although there are more sophisticated indicators developed through the application of a variety of models and algorithms, these indicators are based solely on observations and can be applied globally. We will review advantages and progress thus far in the development of indicators of meteorological drought and severity derived from AIRS.