Czech scientists from the Global Change Research Institute CAS – CzechGlobe, together with their American colleagues from the National Drought Mitigation Center, have launched the first global system for monitoring and forecasting the occurrence of drought and its impacts. On the website https://terradrought.eu/ (and its U.S. counterpart http://terradrought.unl.edu/), users can find up-to-date and detailed information on current drought episodes worldwide, as well as an archive of these events. The monitoring system is based on the continuous analysis of media outputs in 14 world languages, carried out by a team of collaborating students from Brno universities.
The entire project is coordinated by a team that has been running the Intersucho project since 2011, which monitors drought in the Czech Republic and Central Europe. Several years ago, the scientists also launched, in cooperation with the Windy.com platform, a global monitoring system of current soil moisture and its forecast. “However, a soil moisture anomaly does not necessarily mean that drought is causing problems. Nevertheless, our analyses show that drought is a steadily growing problem, and our goal is to provide up-to-date information on its impacts anywhere in the world,” said team leader and bioclimatologist Miroslav Trnka.
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