Hydrometeorological and vegetation indices for the drought.pdfVIP

Adv. Geosci., 17, 105– 110, 2009 /17/105/2009/ Advances in © Author(s) 2009. This work is distributed under Geosciences the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Hydrometeorological and vegetation indices for the drought monitoring system in Tuscany Region, Italy F. Caparrini1,2 and F. Manzella1 1Centro Funzionale Regione Toscana, Pisa, Italy 2Eumechanos, Firenze, Italy Received: 16 January 2008 – Revised: 19 May 2008 – Accepted: 11 March 2009 – Published: 16 March 2009 Abstract. We present here the first experiments for an inte- and impacts, and is not limited to arid areas where scarcity grated system that is under development for drought moni- of precipitation is a permanent climatic condition. toring and water resources assessment in Tuscany Region in Compared to other natural hazards, in a sense, drought central Italy. The system is based on the cross-evaluation is more difficult to monitor since it is a slow phenomenon of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Vegetation (some authors say “creeping”, Tannehill, 1947) and its im- Indices from remote sensing (from MODIS and SEVIRI- pacts can be underestimated until they reach peak intensi- MSG), and outputs from the distributed hydrological model ties. On the other hand, the mitigation of damages caused by MOBIDIC, that is used in real-time for water balance evalua- drought require an adequate water resources planning that tion and hydrological forecast in the major basins of Tuscany. can be efficiently accomplished only if routine monitoring Furthermore, a telemetric network of aquifer levels is near has been carried on. completion in the region, and data from nearly 50 stations are