Drought and Crop Nowcast and Forecast in NASA SERVIR Hubs

Drought is a principal type of natural disaster and is at the core of serious challenges and threats facing sustainable development, threatening the livelihoods of billons and the natural resources on which they depend. An integrated system comprising hydrologic model and crop model that can monitor/nowcast and forecast the drought status, water stress situations and expected crop yield is the answer to the above problem. Such a system can mitigate the knowledge gap while taking important decisions pertaining to resource allocations and preemptive actions to reduce the impact of drought and crop failure. A Regional Hydrologic Extreme Assessment System (RHEAS) is developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and implemented in the NASA SERVIR hub at RCMRD in Nairobi and SERVIR hub at ADPC in Bangkok. RHEAS ingests a suite of Earth science products including forecast model output and satellite observations of soil moisture, precipitation, and evapotranspiration. Although there are currently systems that provide global drought assessment and predictions using satellite observations, our approach is unique in that we focus on regional applications at finer-scale resolution. RHEAS provides: 1) near real-time drought risk assessments; 2) seasonal forecast of agriculture and hydrological droughts; 3) seasonal forecast of primary crop (maize) yield; and 4) drought probability maps. A hindcast study was conducted to assess the skills of the RHEAS nowcast and forecast over the East Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania) domain for maize, and over the Lower Mekong River Basin (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) for rice. Results from these studies, especially, the drought indicators and the crop yields are validated using the in-situ observations. In the presentation, we will show these results from the impactful study that will help the RHEAS integrated framework to advance to ARL-8 in the SERVIR hubs.