METEOROLOGY

Longer periods of drought and more frequent extreme weather events affect the landscape's water balance and increase pressure on natural and managed systems. Continuous drought monitoring enables the early detection of critical developments and supports proactive management of agriculture, forests, water resources, and urban areas.
 

For scientific drought monitoring, it is useful to combine various parameters, as drought cannot be described solely in terms of precipitation or soil moisture. Relevant parameters include precipitation, soil moisture, soil water potential, groundwater level, runoff, air temperature, and air humidity, as well as evaporation and evapotranspiration. Vegetation parameters, radiation, and wind can also be recorded. Combining these data makes it possible to track the development and intensity of drought with spatial and temporal resolution and to assess its impacts on soils, vegetation, the water cycle, and landscapes.
 

A holistic approach to drought monitoring takes into account the interactions between the atmosphere, soil, the water cycle, and vegetation. To this end, various measurement systems can be combined: weather stations record meteorological variables, while soil moisture and temperature sensors, as well as tensiometers, monitor soil conditions. Lysimeters and evaporation pans provide information on the water balance, while dendrometers and sap flow sensors measure vegetation’s response to drought stress. Data loggers, networked measurement systems, and IoT solutions enable the automated collection, storage, and transmission of measurement data. This allows individual measurement sites to be linked into spatially distributed monitoring networks, enabling trends to be tracked over extended periods.