China Drought Meteorology Scientific Research Project

Drought is one of the costliest natural disasters worldwide with serious impacts on society which can take multiple forms, including meteorological drought, agricultural drought, and hydrological drought. It is a key issue be concerned not only by federal governments but also by geoscientists over the world. In China, a number of important programs focus on measurements for monitoring and forecasting significant hazards. However, current research achievements are hard to meet the challenges posed by this hazard because of the complexity of formation mechanism and social impacts of droughts. Therefore, improved technique level on formation mechanism, drought monitoring, early warning and assessing are urgently needed to cope with these scientific issues. In this background, a great project “China Drought Meteorology Scientific Research Project (CDMSRP)” (from 2015-2018) is set up recently in China. In the project, the Institute of Arid Meteorology, located at the northwest part of China, work with the cooperation of numerous other departments such as universities, research institutes and operational departments for meteorology, to implement a interdisciplinary, comprehensive and systematic drought meteorology scientific research. The aim of this project is to develop basic theory of drought meteorology, to improve the technique level of drought monitoring, warning and impact assessing and to enhance the prevention and mitigation capacity to disasters. The research mission include：1) key driving factors and physical mechanism of severe regional drought events; 2) disaster-causing processes and mechanism of drought in key regions; 3) influence of precipitation on sustaining and relieving of droughts in experimental regions; 4) research on development of land surface model and regional climate model in arid and semi-arid regions; 5) regional adaptability of drought indices and drought monitoring technique with multi-indices; 6) risk assessment technique of drought; 7) early warning and information-sharing platform with multi-sources for drought. At the same time, five observation experiments were constructed in order to support above research mission as well as enhance data sharing and usage ability: 1) characteristics of land surface processes and atmospheric boundary layer for drought; 2) disaster-causing processes and mechanism of drought; 3) influence of precipitation on sustaining and relieving of drought; 4) regional adaptability of drought indices; 5) formation processes of droughts and regional water circulation. Implementation of this project can provide scientific reference for the arrangement of drought meteorology observation network and improve the capability of drought monitoring, forecasting and risk assessing of severe droughts in China.