Drought monitoring, prediction and adaptation under climatic changes

The objective of this project is to develop a quantitative and operational system for nationwide drought monitoring and drought impact assessment for application in agriculture, water resources and environmental management in China using ESA, Chinese and other relevant satellite data as major data source in combination with other data source (e.g. meteorological and drought statistics, etc.). An extension to drought prediction and adaptation to climate change will be made compared to the Dragon I drought monitoring project. In detail the project aims to generate: (1) a real time drought monitoring and prediction system, (2) improved understanding of land surface processes and land-atmosphere interactions over different terrains (e.g. agriculture land, forest, Gobi desert, high plateau, polar environment), (3) improved algorithms for estimation of land surface parameters and heat fluxes, (4) assessment of economic loss caused by drought and adaptation measures under climatic change, (5) training of young scientists in the area of water, climate and environment. In this contribution, progresses in retrievals of soil moisture using data from different methods are addressed, including in-situ observations, direct retrievals using data from satellite sensors and numerical modeling. The used sensors include ASAR, ASCAT, and AMSR-E. The accuracy of available soil moisture products are assessed using in-situ data collected by the Tibetan Plateau soil moisture monitoring network developed for this and other projects.