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.

干旱是复杂的，缓慢的且昂贵的自然危害。当它们在水周期中传播时，检测他们的发作并跟踪其发育可能很困难。尽管英国是一个刻板印象的潮湿国家，但2012年和2018年最近的干旱对供水，同意和环境产生了重大影响。未来气候的预计变化表明，在未来几十年中，它们将变得更加频繁和严重。因此，无论现在和在一个快速变暖的世界中，我们都需要紧急地对干旱更具抵抗力和为干旱做好准备。干旱监测和预警（MEW）是有效干旱管理的重要组成部分，但这对定义干旱的挑战，在识别干旱影响非常严重之前所面临的困难以及使用干旱MEW信息的广泛决策者的潜水员需求是复杂的。在英国，在过去的十年中，干旱研究取得了长足的进步，感谢英国生态与水文学中心（UKCEH）领导的1,250万英镑的NERC干旱和水短缺计划（DWSP）以及其他UKCEH参与的盟军国际研究项目。这导致了对干旱和干旱MEW工具的发展的显着进步。这包括英国水资源门户网站，该门户提供实时水电学数据和干旱指标。但是，像这样的干旱监测工具通常缺乏有关干旱影响的信息 - 尽管这是决策者采取行动所需的最重要的证据，正如我们在工作中所强调的那样，我们与供水，协议，健康，能源和环境等部门的主要利益相关者所做的那样。了解MEW系统中常用的干旱指标（即描述物理干旱危害，例如在降雨或河流流中）与在地面上看到的干旱影响一直是干旱科学家的重点。但是，由于收集和记录干旱影响的挑战，该分析通常是在大型空间尺度上进行的（例如，对于整个威尔士），这与倾向于从田间到集水量表进行更多本地尺度管理水的决策者无关。在IRIS项目中，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个空间量表问题，以高空间分辨率预测干旱影响。我们将在三个集成的工作包（WPS）中进行此操作：WP1将专注于从干旱指标和干旱影响的多个来源收集数据，包括以前所未有的高分辨率分辨率的新作物产量数据。我们还将使用近年来诸如Sentinel-2之类的高分辨率遥感数据，以导致干旱影响的代理（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，并使用统计和机器学习方法定量地描述这些关系的“影响功能”。然后，这些关系可用于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，并评估影响森林是否具有足够的技能来管理干旱和减轻影响。该项目的发现和结果有可能通过未来的资助机会将其扩展到全国性的干旱影响预测系统中。基于影响的干旱预测能力将彻底改变英国的干旱方式和减轻干旱的方式，并具有转移到其他国家和环境的巨大潜力。