An integrated framework for monitoring and seasonal forecasting of drought and crop yield for water and agricultural resources management
Abstract
Drought is one of the significant natural hazards which causes huge economic damage every year in various parts of the world depending on regional/local weather extremes. Among all the sectors, agriculture is the first to be affected by drought events, owing to its direct relation to crop yield. Though long-term measurements and forecast products of meteorological/hydrological variables are available, there is a lacking of a skillful integrated hydrological and crop modeling systems that can provide timely information on drought and plant health conditions. In this context, a high-resolution drought and plant health monitoring application has been developed using a comprehensive modeling framework- the Regional Hydrologic Extremes Assessment System (RHEAS), that couples physically based hydrologic and crop models. The RHEAS platform also has the capability to provide short to sub-seasonal/seasonal drought forecasts and seasonal crop yield forecasts using multi-model ensemble system such as North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME). In this study, we have demonstrated the capability of the RHEAS framework to provide reliable nowcast and forecast the hydrologic state variables, drought indices, plant health, and crop yield in different hotspot regions of the world. We have also evaluated the potential of the RHEAS framework to capture the subtle, intrinsic nature of drought and assess the impact on inter-seasonal and intra-annual crop yields. In addition, we have also made an effort to give access to public uses of the outputs from the RHEAS platform. For this, we have developed a web-application that provides near real-time (i.e., current week) and long-term (since 1981 up to last week) drought monitor maps along with the forecast maps of next week to 3-6 months lead time. The web-applications also provide the historical crop growth and potential yield estimation at the local-scale (i.e., districts/county/administrative level) along with the seasonal crop yield forecast of the selected crops. The excess of such a key information (i.e., nowcast and forecast of drought and crop yield) on time can play a key role in facilitating interventions and better decision-making by local bodies, governments, and policymakers to manage water and agricultural resources for achieving sustainable agriculture production.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H42K1420S