Drought Monitoring and Prediction in India

Vimal Mishra, Assistant ProfessorIIT Gandhinagar

vmishra@iitgn.ac.in

Drought: often among forgotten disasters

Rajasthan in India, which has suffered five consecutive years of drought (The Hindustan times, 24th May, 2003).

Of the 608 million people affected by disasters in 2002, 300 million were hit by drought in India.

Source: BBC

IntroductionCrops in India Wilt in a Weak Monsoon Season (Drought , 2012)

Source: NY Times

http://kmhouseindia.blogspot.com

Drought and Food Related Challenges

Alarming food security threat in India ……..

Source: International Food Policy Research Institute

Increasing water stress and depleting groundwater resources……..

Vorosmorty et al. 2008

Rodell et al., 2009

Drought and Water Related Challenges

Problem statement:Necessity of Real Time Drought

Monitoring• Rapid groundwater depletion (4 cm/year) between

2002 to 2008• Low irrigation efficiency and high groundwater

extraction• Higher dependency on precipitation and soil

moisture• Real-time information on droughts may help in

planning and decision making• Our country lacks a high resolution real-time

drought monitor

http://sac.csic.es/spei/map/maps.html

http://www.imd.gov.in/section/hydro/dynamic/seasonal-rainfall.htm

Global Drought Early Warning System (Pozzi et al. 2013)

ApproachPrecipitation data from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), NASA

0.25 degree, daily satellite based TRMM 3B42RTv7 product is used.

Temperature data from Global Ensemble Forecast System Analysis (GEFS)

1 degree, daily, control condition, from GEFS is used.1 degree temperature is regridded to 0.25 degree using

Maurer et al. 2002

Both real-time precipitation and temperature are bias-corrected With respect to climatology from IMD

Land Surface Model- The VIC modelMacro-scale hydrologic modelSub-grid variability in land, vegetation,

soil moisture, etc. can be defined statisticallyWater balance mode is used

Experimental Drought Monitor

https://sites.google.com/a/iitgn.ac.in/india_drought_monitor/home

Operates at 25 km resolution at 1-day lag

Drought Monitor

Fig: Flow-chart of drought monitor

Bias-corrected

TRMM

Bias-corrected

GEFS

The VIC Model

Soil Moisture

Runoff

SPI SSI SRI

Validation

Fig: Comparison of drought indices from the Experimental Drought Monitor against the satellite based drought index (DSI) for the monsoon season drought in 2002

Agricultural drought is well comparable to remotely sensed Drought Severity Index (Mu et al., 2013)

SPI

SRI

SSI

DSI

Shah and Mishra (2014)

Validation

Development of a robust drought index using precipitation, soil moisture, and NDVI

SPI+SSI+NDVI= new drought index

Monthly Scale

Shah and Mishra (in preparation)

Validation

Development of a robust drought index using precipitation, soil moisture, and NDVI

SPI+SSI+NDVI= new drought index

Weekly Scale

Shah and Mishra (in preparation)

Agricultural Drought- District level

Fig: 1-month Standardized Soil Moisture Index on 24th September, 2014 in North-Central India

Fig: Divisions of India, for viewing drought at district level

Drought monitoring can be further improved using high resolution rainfall data

Precipitation Monitoring and Forecast

Short-term precipitation forecast can help in multiple ways

Severe flooding in Jammu and Kashmir due to heavy rain on 4th September

Data source is TRMM

Short-term Forecast

Short-term precipitation forecast for HudHud

Forecast Date: 9th October 2014

Short-term precipitation forecast for HudHud

Forecast Date: 11th October 2014

Drought Forecasting

Fig: 7-day lead forecast of drought based on Soil Moisture Percentiles and Runoff Percentiles

Precipitation and Temperature forecast from NCEP Global Ensemble Forecast System

Forced in LSM

Shah and Mishra (in review)

Related publications1. Shah, Reepal and Vimal Mishra (2014b). Development of an

Experimental Near-real Drought Monitor for India. Journal of Hydrometeorology (preprint). http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JHM-D-14-0041.1

2. Mishra, Vimal, Reepal, Shah, and Bridget,Thrasher, (2014) Soil Moisture Droughts under the Retrospective and Projected Climate in India. Journal of Hydrometeorology, AMS(preprint). http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-13-0177.1

3. Shah, Reepal, and Vimal Mishra, 2014a: Evaluation of the Reanalysis Products for the Monsoon Season Droughts in India. J. Hydrometeor, 15, 1575–1591. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-13-0103.1

Thank you

AcknowledgementsFunding agency: Medialab Asia, Department of

Information Technology Measurement to Management (M2M): Improved water use efficiency and agricultural productivity

through experimental sensor network

For more information please visit: https://sites.google.com/a/iitgn.ac.in/india_droug

ht_monitor/