A introduction of a Scientific Research Program on Chinese Drought

Drought is one of the major meteorological disasters, with high frequencies, wide distributions and serious conditions. It is one of the biggest impacts on global agricultural productions, ecological environment and socioeconomic sustainable developments. China is particularly one of the countries in the world with serious drought disasters.

The goal of this project is improving the capabilities in drought monitoring and forecasting based on an in-depth theories of drought. The project will be implemented in the typical extreme drought area based on comprehensive and systemic observation network and numerical experiments It will show a complete feedback mechanism among the atmospheric, water, biological and other spheres for forming drought. First, the atmospheric droughts that leads to agriculture and hydrologic drought and the possible causes for these disasters will be explored using our observation data sets. Second, the capability of monitoring, forecasting and early warning for drought will be developed with numerical model (regional climate model and land surface model, etc.). Last but not the least, evaluation approaches for the risk of drought and the strategy of predicting/prohibiting the drought at regional scale will be proposed. Meanwhile, service system and information sharing platform of drought monitoring and early warning will be established to improve the technical level of drought disaster preparedness and response in China.