The East Africa Drought Watch is a near-real time system that uses Earth Observation and Weather information to monitor drought conditions in the East Africa region. It contain drought-relevant information such as maps of indicators derived from different data sources (e.g., precipitation measurements, satellite measurements, modelled soil moisture content). Different tools, like Graphs and Compare Layers, allow for displaying and analysing the information and drought reports give an overview of the situation in case of imminent droughts.

The system is a service developed as part of the Intra-ACP Climate Services Project in collaboration with the Drought group of the Natural Disaster Risk Unit at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The system is an adaptation of the European Drought Observatory (EDO) to the conditions in the East Africa region.
The system contains colour coded drought risk information by country and allows users to generate their own analysis and reports containing time series of visual information (e.g. drought risk, precipitation, vegetation, soil moisture). The system contains tools to allow users to assess the drought situation and the risk that current conditions pose to livelihoods. It allows for the user-friendly generation of graphs, maps, time series and will soon allow users to subscribe to receive email reports.
The system is built using Open Source technologies offering opportunities for scalability, flexibility, transparency and sustainability.

Drought has always been a well known and recurrent problem in Eastern Africa. The region is made up of more than 60% of arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), and prone to frequent and severe droughts. The population of the region is considered to be among the most vulnerable in Africa. In the past droughts led to some of the worst humanitarian crises of the 20th century, such as the Famine that affected Ethiopia and Sudan in the 80’. The severe droughts in Ethiopia in 1973 and 1983 caused a total of 400,000 deaths and 150,000 deaths in Sudan in 1983. Just 10 years ago, in 2011, it is estimated that up to 260,000 people died because of drought.

Climate Change and environmental degradation are exacerbating the risks posed by Droughts. The region is already affected by chronic vulnerability, with persistent food and nutrition insecurity, widespread economic and social hardships, conflict and displacement.

Having functional public, transboundary Early Warning systems for Drought monitoring, and building them by making use of the latest technologies is key to increase the coping capacity of the populations of the region and their resilience to increasing climate extremes.
The system is able to generate time series analysis reports containing charts, and maps centred around a user-defined point. Development is well underway to extend this analysis for an administrative boundary.

The development of the system is currently ongoing with plans to integrate periodic products disseminated as comprehensive reports to subscribed users, provide additional thematic datasets, perform drought forecasting, translate system warnings into impact-based information/warnings among other plans.
Here are some of the layers that you will find

The Combined Drought Indicator, based on The SPI (Standardized Precipitation Index), SMA (Soil Moisture Anomaly) and FAPAR Anomaly (Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation), identifies areas with potential to suffer agricultural drought, areas where the vegetation is already affected by drought conditions, and areas in recovery process to normal conditions after a drought episode. This indicator has been integrated into the East Africa Hazards Watch. This layer is currently experimental and plans are well underway to further customize and strengthen this indicator for the region.

What is Drought?

Drought is a recurrent feature of the climate that results from a shortfall in precipitation over an period of time, its inadequate timing compared to the needs of the vegetation cover, or a negative water balance due to an increased potential evapo-transpiration caused by high temperatures.

These conditions may be exacerbated by strong winds, atmospheric blocking patterns and antecedent conditions in soil moisture, reservoirs and aquifers, for example. If this situation leads to an unusual and temporary deficit in water availability, it is termed a drought. Droughts are to be distinguished from aridity, a permanent climatic feature, and from water scarcity, a situation where the climatologically available water resources are insufficient to satisfy long-term average water requirements.
Meterological Drought

Period with an abnormal precipitation deficit, in relation to the long-term average conditions for a region.

Amongst the indicators of meteorological drought, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) are the most well-known. They are probabilistic measures of the severity of anomalous dry events, which can be calculated for various rainfall accumulation periods (e.g. 1 to 48 months) and statistically linked to impacts in different economic and environmental sectors.

Snowpack or snow water equivalent (SWE) is another important variable in Northern Europe and in mountainous regions, which affects water availability over the year, by snow accumulation and melt.