IndicatoRs to Impacts for drought Surveillance and management (IRIS)

干旱监测和管理影响指标 (IRIS)

• 批准号: NE/X012727/1
• 负责人: Jamie Hannaford
• 金额: $ 12.89万
• 依托单位: UK CENTRE FOR ECOLOGY & HYDROLOGY
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FX012727%2F1
• 关键词: IndicatoRs; Impacts; drought; Surveillance; management

Droughts are complex, slow-evolving and costly natural hazards. Detecting their onset and tracking their development can be hard, as they spread through the water cycle. Although the UK is stereotypically a wet country, recent droughts in 2012 and 2018 had significant impacts on water supplies, agriculture and the environment. Projected changes to future climate suggests that they will become more frequent and severe in the coming decades. We therefore need to urgently be more resilient to and better prepared for droughts, both now and in a rapidly warming world. Drought Monitoring and Early Warning (MEW) is an important part of effective drought management, but this is complicated by the challenges in defining drought, the difficulties in identifying drought impacts before they are very severe, and the diverse needs of the wide range of decision makers that use drought MEW information. In the UK, drought research has advanced substantially over the past decade thanks to the £12.5m NERC Drought and Water Scarcity Programme (DWSP) led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), as well as other allied international research projects in which UKCEH was heavily involved. This has led to significant progress in the understanding of droughts and the development of drought MEW tools. This includes the UK Water Resources Portal, which provides real-time hydro-meteorological data and drought indicators. However, drought monitoring tools like this typically lack information on drought impacts - despite the fact that this is the single most important piece of evidence required by decision makers to take actions, as has been highlighted in work we have done with key stakeholders from sectors including water supply, agriculture, health, energy and the environment. Understanding the link between drought indicators commonly used in MEW systems (i.e. that describe the physical drought hazard, e.g. in terms of rainfall or river flows) with the drought impacts seen on the ground has been the focus of drought scientists for some time. However, due to the challenges of collecting and recording drought impacts, the analysis has generally been carried out at large spatial scales (e.g. for Wales as a whole), which are not relevant to decision makers who tend to manage water at more local scales, from field to catchment scale. In the IRIS project, we propose to address this issue of spatial scale by using new high resolution drought indicators and drought impact datasets to predict drought impacts at a high spatial resolution. We will do this across three integrated Work Packages (WPs): WP1 will focus on gathering data from multiple sources of both drought indicators and drought impacts, including new crop yield data at an unprecedentedly high resolution for the UK. We will also use high resolution remote sensing data which have become available in recent years such as Sentinel-2 to derive proxies for drought impacts (e.g., vegetation indices and wildfires). WP2 will then use the data gathered in WP1 to identify the relationships between drought indicators and drought impacts, and build 'impact functions' that describe these relationships quantitatively, using statistical and machine learning approaches. These relationships can then be used to forecast potential drought impacts using indicators that are readily available in near-real-time. In WP3 we will work with key stakeholders to develop case studies and assess whether the impact forecasts have sufficient skill to be used to manage droughts and mitigate impacts. The findings and outcomes of this project have the potential to be scaled up into a nation-wide drought impact forecasting system through future funding opportunities. An impact-based drought forecasting capability would revolutionise the way droughts are managed and mitigated in the UK, and would have huge potential for transferring to other countries and environments.

干旱是一种复杂、发展缓慢且代价高昂的自然灾害，因为它们通过水循环传播，因此检测其发生和发展可能很困难。未来气候的预计变化表明，未来几十年，干旱将变得更加频繁和严重，因此，无论是现在还是未来，我们都迫切需要增强应对干旱的能力并做好更好的准备。快速变暖的世界干旱监测和预警（MEW）是有效干旱管理的重要组成部分，但由于定义干旱的挑战、在干旱影响非常严重之前识别干旱影响的困难以及人们的多样化需求，这使得这一问题变得复杂。广泛的决策者使用干旱 MEW 信息 在英国，得益于英国生态与水文中心领导的耗资 1,250 万英镑的 NERC 干旱和水资源短缺计划 (DWSP)，英国的干旱研究在过去十年中取得了显着进展。 (UKCEH) 以及 UKCEH 大力参与的其他联合国际研究项目，这使得人们在了解干旱和开发干旱 MEW 工具方面取得了重大进展，其中包括提供实时信息的英国水资源门户网站。然而，像这样的干旱监测工具通常缺乏有关干旱影响的信息——尽管正如工作中强调的那样，这是决策者采取行动所需的最重要的证据。我们已经与主要利益相关者完成了了解 MEW 系统中常用的干旱指标（即描述物理干旱危害，例如降雨量或河流流量）与干旱对环境的影响之间的联系。一段时间以来，地面一直是干旱科学家关注的焦点，然而，由于收集和记录干旱影响的挑战，分析通常是在大空间尺度上进行的（例如整个威尔士），这与干旱无关。倾向于管理水的决策者在更局部的尺度上，从田地到流域尺度，我们建议通过使用新的高分辨率干旱指标和干旱影响数据集来解决这一空间尺度问题，以高空间分辨率预测干旱影响。跨越三个综合工作包（WP）：WP1将侧重于从多个来源收集干旱指标和干旱影响的数据，包括英国前所未有的高分辨率的新作物产量数据。近年来已经出现，例如Sentinel-2 得出干旱影响的代理（例如，植被指数和野火），然后 WP2 将使用 WP1 中收集的数据来确定干旱指标和干旱影响之间的关系，并建立定量描述这些关系的“影响函数”。使用统计和机器学习方法，然后可以使用这些关系来使用近实时可用的指标来预测潜在的干旱影响，在 WP3 中，我们将与主要利益相关者合作开发案例研究并评估影响预测是否有效。该项目的调查结果和成果有可能通过未来的融资机会扩大到全国范围的干旱影响预报系统。英国管理和缓解干旱的方式，并将有巨大的潜力转移到其他国家和环境。