GlobeDrought: A global-scale tool for characterising droughts and quantifying their impact on water resources, crop productivity, trade in food products, and the need for international food aid
GlobeDrought aims to develop a web-based information system for comprehensively characterising drought events. The project will produce a spatially explicit description of drought risks by considering three components: drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability. It will investigate how droughts impact water resources, crop productivity, trade in food products and the need for international food aid. In terms of methodology, the project aims to link satellite-based remote sensing and analyses of precipitation data with hydrological modelling and yield modelling. This will produce indicators for characterising meteorological, hydrological and agricultural droughts, which in turn will make it possible to quantify drought risks. Analyses of socioeconomic data will provide the basis for quantifying exposure and vulnerability. Within the framework of a co-design process, users and stakeholders will help to shape the content and technical design of the drought information system. The global-scale analyses planned for the project will be supplemented by detailed analyses for regions heavily affected by droughts, in particular Southern Africa.
Objectives of the sub-project at University of Göttingen
The goals of the sub-project at University of Göttingen (UG) are to characterize agronomic drought hazard by crop modelling and to quantify the drought impact on crop productivity, international trade flows and the requirement of international food aid. Drought hazard will be quantified at global extent and, with more detail, for selected drought affected regions like Southern Africa. A focus of the activities will be on the improvement of the simulation results of the crop model solution SIMPLACE by assimilation of remotely sensed land use, leaf area index and surface temperature data. For the selected regions, the global hydrological model WaterGAP and SIMPLACE will be coupled to 1) improve the modeling of hydrological drought hazard by WaterGAP and 2) to improve crop yields and water use simualted by SIMPLACE for irrigated crops by using information for available irrigation wate rresources provided by WaterGAP (collaboration with the project partner AG Döll, University of Frankfurt).
UG is also responsible for the coordination of the GlobeDrought project. Therefore, additional administrative-technical objectives are to coordinate the collaboration between project partners, stakeholders and users of the drought information system. The results of global and regional simulations will become essential component of the drought information system which will be developed jointly with stakeholder and user support.
