2025 International Conference on Agricultural Spatial Information Applications (Taichung, Taiwan; 22-23 October 2025)
Oral presentation on “Anticipating Drought: Data, Scenarios, and Forecasts for Resilient Water Management“
Drought is a complex process that spreads over time, space, and across different segments of the hydrological cycle, often turning into an emergency.
It can lead to decreasing streamflow, groundwater recharge, and reservoir storage, increasing water demand and extending the impacts on water availability, with a lagged effect that is difficult to quantify.
The challenge is not just to measure or predict drought, but to transform it into a clear information that guides timely and effective decisions.
In this context, the Drought Scan framework can help to face the inherent complexity of drought dynamics analyzing the past, monitoring and interpreting the present, and looking toward the future through a multi-scale approach.
The study quantifies and compares the water availability of a large reservoir of south of Italy with the precipitation in its upstream catchment, in order to highlight patterns, understand the system’s response to extreme events, identify hydrological cycles, and assess the potential for recovering drought in the near future.
The basin’s water conditions assessment at any given moment is made by the three components of the Drought Scan: 1) the ‘heatmaps’ of continuous multi-scale SPI-like indices – precipitation and reservoir volumes – for understanding patterns of single or cumulative drought shots and their propagation along time; 2) the new Standardized Integrated Drought Index to monitor in real-time seasonal/annual trends and the start/ending of severe phases of a drought; 3) the 1-month SPI-like Cumulative Deviation from Normal curve for analyzing the memory and restoration capacity of the system at medium-long term.
This approach is highly flexible and adaptive and can provide both a general meteo-climatic overview and basin-specific, almost “tailor-made,” impact-oriented information, in the context of operational support and sustainable water resource management.
R. Magno(1)*, A. Di Paola(2), M. Pasqui(2), E. Rapisardi(1), L. Rocchi(1), S. Quaresima(2), E. Di Giuseppe(2), M. Simonetti(2)
(1) IBE – CNR (Institute of BioEconomy of the National Research Council), Florence – Italy.
(2) IBE – CNR (Institute of BioEconomy of the National Research Council), Rome – Italy.
