Monitoring Droughts
O
By HILLARY HOPPOCK
Photographs courtesy Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute
ver the past 30 years, droughts have increasingly affected agricultural production and food security in various regions across the world. India, for instance, has experienced many weak seasonal monsoons over the past 20 years. With the increase in India’s population, there has been a corresponding rise in the demand for food and water for agriculture. This, in turn, has led to depletion of aquifers, primarily due to expanding agricultural irrigation. “India has been looking for technological interventions to help build drought resilient agricultural systems,” says Ravinder Kaur, principal scientist at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) for a collaborative U.S.-India research project
10 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020
through the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF). “We need to monitor droughts more efficiently and implement demand-driven irrigation schedules for our crops.” She feels that the University of NebraskaLincoln (UNL) was the logical choice for an exchange of scientists and researchers with IARI. Home to the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), the university has extensive experience in drought monitoring in different regions of the world. “The Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute (DWFI) at the University of Nebraska uses the hybrid SETMI [spatial evapotranspiration modeling interface] model to apply the remotely sensed inputs for monitoring field- or catchment-scale crop
