The Global Drought Observatory (GDO): Integrating Hazard, Exposure and Vulnerability for Risk Analysis and Emergency Response
Abstract
Droughts are occurring on all continents and across all climates. While in developed countries they cause significant economic and environmental damages, in less developed countries they may cause major humanitarian catastrophes. The magnitude of recent drought disasters and the expected increase in drought frequency, extent and severity in many, often highly vulnerable regions of the world demand a change from the current reactive, crisis-management approach towards a more pro-active, risk management approach. To do so requires adequate and timely information from global to local scales.
Drought information systems are important for continuous monitoring and forecasting of the situation in order to provide timely information on developing drought events and their potential impacts. In this context, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC) is developing a Global Drought Observatory (GDO) for the EC's humanitarian services, providing up-to-date information on droughts worldwide as well as their potential impacts. The drought hazard is monitored by a combination of meteorological, soil moisture and vegetation stress indicators, while the exposure, societal vulnerability and coping capacity to droughts are assessed through the analysis of a series of social, economic and infrastructural indicators. The combination of the information on the occurrence and severity of a drought, on the assets at risk and on the societal vulnerability results in a likelihood of impact, which is expressed by sectorial Risk of Drought Impact (RDrI) indicators. The location, extent and magnitude of the RDrIs is then further analyzed against the number of people and land use/land cover types affected in order to provide the decision bodies with information on the potential humanitarian and economic bearings in the affected regions. All information is presented through web-mapping interfaces using free and Open Source technologies, allowing the user to draw customized reports. The system is further developed by increasing the number of sectorial impact indicators, adding a forecasting component and a global drought events database, and validated against known cases around the world. The presentation will provide an overview on the system, the risk analysis methodology, and selected case studies.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H42C..01V
- Keywords:
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- 1812 Drought;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1817 Extreme events;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1834 Human impacts;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1843 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4327 Resilience;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4328 Risk;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4928 Global climate models;
- PALEOCEANOGRAPHY