Building Open Environment for Near Real-Time Monitoring And Analysis Of Global Agricultural Drought

It is of great importance and an urgent demand to enable operational and near real-time monitoring and analysis of global agricultural drought utilizing remote sensing data at desirable spatial and temporal resolutions. Traditional approaches and existing systems are not able to meet the demand because of Big Data and geoprocessing/modeling challenges. The latest advances in Web service, geospatial interoperability and cyberinfrastructure technologies have shown potentials to address the challenges and meet the demand. Building an open data, information, and knowledge environment through an innovative geospatial Web service approach leveraging the recent technical advances can effectively and efficiently enable operational, on-demand, and near real-time monitoring, forecasting and analysis of global agricultural drought. Such an environment can also play an essential role in providing reasonable solutions to problems that we face with climate change, environment protection, and other global issues and promoting scientific democracy progress by making vast data, information and computing resources easily online accessible to the general public. The Global Agricultural Drought Monitoring and Forecasting System (GADMFS), built by Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS) at George Mason University (GMU), is such an environment. GADMFS is able to overcome major limitations of current drought information systems and better support decision making with improved global agricultural drought monitoring, prediction, information dissemination and analysis services through improved data-, service- and system-level interoperability and servability. Furthermore, the standards-compliant and cyber-based system architecture design of GADMFS enables the interoperability of its data, services, and system components with third party applications, making it a valuable contribution to Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). It will benefit the societies in pre-warning and quick response to nature disasters and also greatly facilitate worldwide drought-related research, education and applications.