Research demonstrates: it is possible to predict the consequences of drought
Publication in Nature Communications
With the drought of 2018 and this year throughout big parts of the Netherlands still fresh in everyone's memory, there is an increasing demand for seasonal forecasts for drought. These are needed in order to take measures in advance to limit the consequences of drought for, among other things, nature, agriculture and shipping traffic. In European research that was published in Nature Communications today, researchers of the universities of Wageningen, Utrecht and Freiburg (Germany) show that it is possible to predict the consequences of drought on matters such as shipping traffic, public water supplies, water quality and ecosystems for the upstream part of the Rhine.
Hydrologist Dr Niko Wanders of Utrecht 木瓜福利影视 is one of the authors of the publication. His discovery that drought can be predicted up to two months in advance formed an important link in the European research.
The researchers also used a European database, the European Drought Impact Inventory (EDII), which compiles thousands of reported consequences of drought for various sectors over the past decades. With machine-learning techniques, the consequences in a certain past month were linked to past drought periods. Then, the researchers used this linked data and historical seasonal forecasts of drought to predict the consequences for certain sectors and areas for every month in the period of 1990-2017. They then compared those predictions to the observed consequences. This showed that relevant forecasts of the consequences of drought for some sectors can be issued two to four months in advance, and sometimes even longer.
Better preparations for future drought problems
It is important that water managers and other parties who stand to gain from predictions of the consequences of drought gain experience in seasonal forecasts. In part because future periods of drought are probably going to occur more frequently in the Netherlands, as Niko Wanders and his colleagues already previously calculated. The step at which we can really predict the consequences of drought is a missing link that can be very important for the water management of the Netherlands. We can learn from the past in order to prepare ourselves better for future drought problems.
Publication
S.J. Sutanto, M. van der Weert, N. Wanders*, V. Blauhut, H.A.J. van Lanen
Nature Communications 10, 2019
* = employed at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视