Towards an integrated soil moisture drought monitor for East Africa

Date

2011-12-05

Author

Anderson, Weston B
Hain, Christopher
Zaitchik, Benjamin F
Anderson, Martha C
Aga Alo, Clement
Yılmaz, Mustafa Tuğrul

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Drought in East Africa is a recurring phenomenonwith significant humanitarian impacts. Given the steep cli-matic gradients, topographic contrasts, general data scarcity,and, in places, political instability that characterize the re-gion, there is a need for spatially distributed, remotely de-rived monitoring systems to inform national and internationaldrought response. At the same time, the very diversity anddata scarcity that necessitate remote monitoring also makeit difficult to evaluate the reliability of these systems. Herewe apply a suite of remote monitoring techniques to charac-terize the temporal and spatial evolution of the 2010–2011Horn of Africa drought. Diverse satellite observations al-low for evaluation of meteorological, agricultural, and hy-drological aspects of drought, each of which is of interestto different stakeholders. Focusing on soil moisture, we ap-ply triple collocation analysis (TCA) to three independentmethods for estimating soil moisture anomalies to charac-terize relative error between products and to provide a ba-sis for objective data merging. The three soil moisture meth-ods evaluated include microwave remote sensing using theAdvanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observ-ing System (AMSR-E) sensor, thermal remote sensing us-ing the Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) sur-face energy balance algorithm, and physically based landsurface modeling using the Noah land surface model. Itwas found that the three soil moisture monitoring methodsyield similar drought anomaly estimates in areas character-ized by extremely low or by moderate vegetation cover, par-ticularly during the below-average 2011 long rainy season.Systematic discrepancies were found, however, in regions ofmoderately low vegetation cover and high vegetation cover,especially during the failed 2010 short rains. The merged,TCA-weighted soil moisture composite product takes advan-tage of the relative strengths of each method, as judged by theconsistency of anomaly estimates across independent meth-ods. This approach holds potential as a remote soil moisture-based drought monitoring system that is robust across the di-verse climatic and ecological zones of East Africa

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/82967

Conference Name

American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2011 ( 5 - 09 Aralık 2011)

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

W. B. Anderson, C. Hain, B. F. Zaitchik, M. C. Anderson, C. Aga Alo, and M. T. Yılmaz, “Towards an integrated soil moisture drought monitor for East Africa,” presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2011 ( 5 - 09 Aralık 2011), 2011, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/82967.