FutureWater launches website on drought status of Spain, Portugal and Andorra
The Spanish branch of consultancy firm FutureWater has launched a portal that maps the impact of rainfall on soil moisture and vegetation productivity in Spain, Portugal and Andorra.
The website, InfoSequia, is weekly updated and offers subscriptions on newsletters that inform on drought indices.
Drought levels (vegetation health index): spatially map (top) and aggregated according to water resource systems (bottom)
Platform for drought management
FutureWater is working on an operational toolbox called GEISEQ (Gestión Integral de Sequías) which includes a specific module for the detection and monitoring of droughts in 'near-real' time.
The web portal InfoSequia uses satellite data provided by MODIS sensors of the North American Space Agency (NASA).
The portal reports the observed anomalies of the vegetation greenness index and the land surface temperature.
Four warning levels
Similarly to the Spanish Drought Monitoring System, the anomalies are codified into four warning levels of drought status: normal, pre-alert, alert, emergency.
Depending on the drought level reported, water basin authorities define different management objectives and adopt strategic, tactical or emergency measures to reduce the negative impacts of water scarcity.
Long drought periods
Additionally the GEISEQ platform, also developed by FutureWater, provides anomalies that refer to specific dates (singular Index) or to longer periods (1 year) in order to capture the cumulative effects of droughts on the state variables (multitemporal index).
Finally, results are shown through spatially-distributed layers or aggregated according to areas of special interest , such as administrative boundaries, protected natural areas, agriculture demand units, water resource systems.
Go to website: www.infosequia.es (in Spanish)
This news item was originally published on the website of FutureWater.
Read also on this website
● FutureWater studies a financial scheme for watershed services in Rwenzori national park, Uganda, 21 September 2015
● FutureWater to balance water accounts in Segura River Basin, Spain, 28 January 2014
More information
FutureWater
Wageningen, the Netherlands
+31 317 46 00 50
www.futurewater.nl