Remote Sensing for Drought Monitoring and Forecasting

Dear Colleagues,

The drought is a creeping and complex phenomenon with different types of impacts. Drought dynamic reveals a time gap between the onset phase of an event and the management phase of the consequent emergency, but often, this gap is too wide to reduce negative impacts effectively. Furthermore, drought information is frequently scattered and not integrated enough to support diverse users’ real needs. 

The reliable early identification of drought episodes, along with their evolution scenarios, would significantly increase the ability to deal with and manage periods of agro-ecosystem stress or water scarcity. The nexus among local knowledge elements, scientific data, and the use of indicators related to them could significantly improve the identification of the human societal negative consequences of drought. Furthermore, climate change places our society under increasing pressure by forcing humans to adapt. Thus, there is an urgent need to increase preparedness through proactive solutions providing timely and simple information to a broader audience. Such a growing demand for knowledge of drought monitoring and prediction will contribute to mitigating and managing emerging social negative impacts and conflicts during periods of rainfall deficits by increasing preparedness, stimulating resilience, and improving adaptation options. 

The recent development of satellite-based remote sensing techniques and in situ sensors has increased our ability to observe the state of agro-ecosystems on Earth. Thus, by increasing our level of understanding the evolution of drought and by identifying risks and negative impacts earlier, we could now better contribute to improving risk mitigation processes in agro-ecosystems, food production, and food security systems worldwide.

This Special Issue of Remote Sensing addresses papers that propose innovative strategies for monitoring and forecasting drought triggering and development mechanisms that will break down barriers for users with different levels of backgrounds in managing water resources during prolonged periods of rainfall shortage. Cross-cutting approaches that bridge environmental/geophysical drought features with socioeconomic impacts and options are also welcome. Areas of special interest include but not are limited to:

• Use of numerical and empirical modeling for the seasonal and climatic prediction of drought;
• Innovative numerical techniques to integrate in-situ and satellite-based remote sensed data to improve social resilience to drought;
• Innovative methods to analyze the spatiotemporal structures of drought and to identify internal and external forcing in drought onset and development;
• Effective and authoritative approaches to communicate and visualize drought conditions;
• Data mining and GIS applications for drought monitoring, forecasting, and visualizing;
• Regional, continental, and global scale case studies of early warning systems developed in recent years as integrated drought climate services;
• Approaches for measuring uncertainty in drought monitoring and prediction.

Dr. Massimiliano Pasqui
Dr. Ramona Magno
Dr. Luca Brocca
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. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2700 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.