Windy joined forces with CzechGlobe to forecast global drought

Korina

Millions of people globally are affected by drought every year, it is a natural climate cycle, which is characterized by the lack of precipitation, resulting in a water shortage. Drought is a phenomenon that always occurs on our planet in some form at a given time and can have serious impacts on people’s health, society, economies, agriculture and environment.

We believe that having a tool allowing professionals as well as regular users to analyse current drought situation could greatly improve efforts to cope with drought and making appropriate decisions.

This was the reason why we started to work with CzechGlobe (Global Change Research Institute CAS) on a joint project to monitor and especially forecast drought not only in Czech, but on a global scale.

The challenge was to create a global model that would forecast drought based on available meteorological data several days ahead. This led to a creation of a tool that allows you to monitor the soil moisture supply in real time and forecast its development for the next 10 days.

We are excited to present 3 new layers Soil moisture, Moisture anomaly and Drought intensity.

Soil moisture

Readily available soil water represents the amount of water available to plants as a proportion of the maximum soil water content that can be permanently held within the given soil column.

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Drought anomaly

Available water deficit is the amount of water in mm/inch per the visualized soil column that is missing (or is in surplus) compared to the common levels (average of 1961 to 2010) of available water at the given site and time of the year.

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Drought intensity

Drought intensity compares the actual amount of water available to plants with the values recorded for the given area during the same time period of the year between 1961 and 2010. Each drought intensity class represents a particular drought period return probability.

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Drought layers will appear in mobile apps in the upcoming weeks.

In case you have further questions regarding the Drought layers, leave us a message in this category.

idefix37

@korina
These new layers should be very useful tools for agriculture and water supply. It's an impressive job as it needs to take into account the type of soils all over the world. Otherwise it will not be very precise. May we have more information about the parameters used by the models?

Korina

@idefix37 Hi, we have created a special category for questions related to Drought monitoring. Please make a post there and our colleagues from CzechGlobe will reply you.

Chickasaw

This has been much needed on Windy and I personally applaud all of you. It was once possible to read the weather and seasons but things have shifted, making knowing when to plant, when to water or not and what to plant, practically impossible to figure out. We still rely on our own source of vegetables, nuts, and fruits for survival but when should we assist our lone peach tree with water is something we have been trying to figure out. This will help. Also, seeing relationships between everything on Windy, including windmill noise, enables us to create some pretty strong theories for ourselves about what is creating what appears to be weather gone mad. Thank you!

sumerian2017

Thanks for all your hard work to give us a chance to use this data for our own decision-making process of the world around us. I have learned a lot about weather by using your site to create curiosity of what weather is all about and how Geo-Engineering affects us all. Happy Holidays to you Windy!

auweatherwatcher

This is a really cool addition and also very helpful for us in Australia too! we get lots of droughts and it's really helpful being able to see the soil moisture levels in various places.

przemo1986

@korina rozumiem że warstwy zostaną dodane do aplikacji mobilnej ?

lecoultre13 0

Hi :-)
Super. This I will enjoy. More weather...better weather :-)

Korina

@przemo1986 Hello, yes, new layers will come to mobile apps within several weeks.

Korina

@auweatherwatcher @lecoultre13-0 Happy to hear this, we always appreciate your feedback :)

ubugnu

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