Abstract
Abstract. During the last decade, many climatic parameters are more and more deviating from the mean values calculated over historical climatic time-series. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) stated that years 2015, 2016 and 2017 were the warmest since 1850. According to the preliminary data analysis of the last year, this trend is going to continue in 2018 as well. These climatic changes have accelerated the occurrence of droughts in many parts of the world including Europe and Asia. The North Western region is one such region in Sri Lanka which always affected by droughts due to its inherent dry weather condition. Although drought is considered as a normal part of the climate, its increasing negative impacts on human activities and the environment urges the application of novel technologies in drought monitoring. The 4onse project (analysis of Open, Non-conventional, Sustainable and Effective monitoring systems), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), is a project began in this context to address the aforementioned mentioned issues by deploying 27 open technologies based Environmental Monitoring Systems (EMS) in Deduru Oya basin of Sri Lanka. These systems measure weather parameters such as temperature, humidity, pressure, rainfall, wind speed and wind direction. Thanks to the collected data, it was possible to calculate some drought indexes to evaluate the intensity of the dry periods. The Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) has been selected as the principal indicator to evaluate droughts by integrating the 4onse data together with Climate Hazards group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) dataset.
Highlights
Monitoring environmental parameters is a key requirement to better understand the natural phenomena and to assess the status of the environment
The 4onse project (Four times Open Non-conventional system for Sensing the Environment), which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), tries to evaluate if a fully open solution can help developing and low-income countries to fill the existing gaps pertaining to environmental monitoring, with the developed countries
The analysis showed three main drought events
Summary
Monitoring environmental parameters is a key requirement to better understand the natural phenomena and to assess the status of the environment. Conventional weather observing networks play a significant role in providing timely data with the highest quality and resolution. This in-situ monitoring is fundamental to calibrate satellite-based weather data and to provide consistent weather data for hydrological and drought evaluation and analysis. In Sri Lanka, the meteorological data and water resources data are collected by five government agencies according to their own protocols. They are, Irrigation Department for hydro-meteorological data; Central Environmental Authority for water quality data; National Water Supply and Drainage Board for ground water data; Water Resources Board for groundwater data; and Meteorological Department for Climate data. Even though the country has 37 Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) installed by different international funding agencies, most of them cannot be adjusted to integrate new parameters (Senevirathna, S. and Jayawickrama, V., 2014)
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