Satellite Technologies for improved drought-risk assessment

The assessment of drought requires the consideration of parameters related to the hazard itself in relation to levels of vulnerability. Current drought indices neglect the latter part and mainly focus on anomalous conditions in the atmosphere. However, in case of agricultural drought the soil moisture content plays a crucial role. Consequently, the project goals are to improve a drought index via satellite-derived soil moisture, improved filtering and pre-processing of NDVI time series, to develop a forecasting component and a mobile phone application, which aims at validation of the new index on site while simultaneously considering local vulnerabilities.