An Agro-Pastoral Phenological Water Balance Framework for Monitoring and Predicting Growing Season Water Deficits and Drought Stress

Frontiers in Climate

Laura Harrison¹  Gideon Galu¹  Juliet Way-Henthorne¹  Will Turner¹  Gregory Husak¹  Chris Funk¹  Kim Slinski²  Andrew Hoell³  Amy McNally⁴ 

[1] Climate Hazards Center, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States;Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Greenbelt, MD, United States;NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States;SAIC Inc., McLean, VA, United States;United States Agency for International Development, Washington, DC, United States;

关键词: agriculture;    agricultural monitoring;    early warning;    food security;    early action;    forecasting;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fclim.2021.716568

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Sharing simple ideas across a broad community of practitioners helps them to work together more effectively. For this reason, drought early warning systems spend a considerable effort on describing how hazards are detected and defined. Well-articulated definitions of drought provide a shared basis for collaboration, response planning, and impact mitigation. One very useful measure of agricultural drought stress has been the “Water Requirement Satisfaction Index” (WRSI). In this study, we develop a new, simpler metric of water requirement satisfaction, the Phenological Water Balance (PWB). We describe this metric, compare it to WRSI and yield statistics in a food-insecure region (east Africa), and show how it can be easily combined with analog-based rainfall forecasts to produce end-of-season estimates of growing season water deficits. In dry areas, the simpler PWB metric is very similar to the WRSI. In these regions, we show that the coupling between rainfall deficits and increased reference evapotranspiration amplifies the impacts of droughts. In wet areas, on the other hand, our new metric provides useful information about water excess—seasons that are so wet that they may not be conducive to good agricultural outcomes. Finally, we present a PWB-based forecast example, demonstrating how this framework can be easily used to translate assumptions about seasonal rainfall outcomes into predictions of growing season water deficits. Effective humanitarian relief efforts rely on early projections of these deficits to design and deploy appropriate targeted responses. At present, it is difficult to combine gridded satellite-gauge precipitation forecasts with climate forecasts. Our new metric helps overcome this obstacle. Future extensions could use the water requirement framework to contextualize other water supply indicators, like actual evapotranspiration values derived from satellite observations or hydrologic models.

【 授权许可】

Unknown