Global Drought Information System

Droughts are produced by multiple environmental factors, and there is a lack of universal, scientific consensus on best practices for drought monitoring at global and continental scales. Rising temperatures, heat waves, increased evaporability accompanying climate change are elevating the predisposition towards drought formation and water scarcity.

The Global Drought Information System (GDIS) provides protection for global agriculture, forests, and human habitation through innovating drought monitoring technology to enable them to operate close to near-real-time, realistic and high resolutions. GDIS explores the relationship between rates of drought incidence and linkages to climate change. GDIS innovates a web mapping geographical information system infrastructure, coupled with cloud processing technology, to support user-useful maps retrievable at high resolutions to process satellite imagery and to make high-resolution images accessible, at any point on the terrestrial globe, outside polar regions in minimal time.

• The Global Drought Monitor depicts current drought conditions across the globe using a “bottom-up” approach Global Drought Monitor
• The American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate published a Special Collection GDIS Drought Worldwide issue which included papers providing a comprehensive overview of the state of our understanding of drought, as well as recent research advances. A synthesis paper attempts to organize the many facets of drought throughout the world into a global view as well as to provide an overall assessment of high priority drought research challenges: here