Advances in Drought Monitoring, Simulation and Prediction

Dear Colleagues,

Drought is a destructive natural hazard with significant impacts on agriculture, water supply, food security and even human health. These impacts will likely become even more important in the future, especially in the ongoing global climate change context. Unlike other natural disasters, droughts are due primarily, but not only, to the lack of seasonal rainfall, and may evolve quickly anywhere, over a period of month or a season and can last for several months to seasons, and possibly even much longer, with sometimes no specific end in sight. On the other hand, recently, a new quickly evolving “flash drought” has appeared in literature and has caught everyone’s attention, even though there has been no clear accepted definition for it.  Overall, the generic term “drought” means different things to different people, as it exhibits itself and it impacts differently in meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological communities.  The real cost of climate change on global humanity and financial markets has not been fully researched yet. However, drought can be very costly, as can be seen from an NCDC (National Climatic Data Center, US) study, which reports that, of the more than 90 “Billion-Dollar-plus” weather- and climate-related disasters from 1980 to 2008; 14 of them were drought- and wildfire-related. The most recent drought and wildfire calamity during 2019 in eastern Australia had devastating consequences and is the worst natural disaster in the country’s history, with severe impacts on many fronts, including human, economic, wildlife, etc.

While (low) precipitation and (high) temperature are the two fundamental contributory factors to any drought, the importance of soil moisture, evaporation, transpiration, runoff, and other related factors and indices cannot be ignored. Over the last few decades, many exciting advances have been made around the world in monitoring, detection and forecasting of drought, including the more recent use of neural networks, machine learning and modern artificial intelligence methods incorporating the many new available drought relevant data sets. In this new Special Issue of the journal Atmosphere from MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute), the pioneer in open access journals, we are looking forward to receiving original papers that document “Advances in Drought Monitoring, Simulation and Prediction".  Submissions will appear in publication upon peer review. We hope that this Special Issue, upon completion, will showcase the state of the art in drought research from authors around the world.  The Special Issue is now open for submissions. 

Dr. Muthuvel Chelliah
Dr. Lifeng Luo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Atmosphere is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.