OEMC project use case: Global drought monitoring at high resolution
Creators: name: Gaona, Jaime
name: Brocca, Luca
name: Filippucci, Paolo
Publisher: name: GEO Knowledge Hub
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: water
subject: hydrology
subject: drought
subject: soil moisture
subject: disaster mitigation
subject: remote sensing
subject: water scarcity
subject: agriculture
subject: forestry
subject: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: FOS: Earth and related environmental sciences
subject: Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries

description: The use case focuses on providing global drought monitoring of sufficient frequency and consistency across scales (from continental to regional scale) to enable continuous assessment of the soil moisture conditions affecting the hydrosphere (e.g. water resources status, extreme events warning systems), atmosphere (e.g. interaction with meteorology) and biosphere (e.g. natural vegetation and crop status), all through the integration of satellite, modelled, and ground-based observations. The use case focuses on the EU to support the development of specific monitoring tools like the European Drought Observatory (EDO) and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO). The monitor builds global drought maps combining soil moisture observation types on a 10–day period temporal scale towards developing near real-time capabilities with the increasingly frequent satellite and model soil moisture estimates.
Stakeholder needs:  
The global and continental scale soil moisture data for drought monitoring is often mixed up from different sources without considering the differences in the datasets' suitability and compatibility for monitoring applications. For this reason, stakeholders in charge of providing reliable monitoring activities require analyzing the suitability of the increasingly available soil moisture datasets for consistent and accurate evaluation of soil moisture evolution. The Joint Research Center of the European Commission is in charge of the global and European drought monitors that include soil moisture data, and by doing so, systematically reviews the capabilities of the already included soil moisture data as well as the potential of new soil moisture datasets. In line with this aim, the JCR is particularly interested in assessing the strengths and limitations of merging different types of soil moisture data that can provide better coverage and consistency than the individual soil moisture products alone, thereby improving drought monitor accuracy.  
Planned implementation:

Merged products are being generated, tested and will be provided as the main data product for drought monitoring at continental scale at European and global scale.
The ultimate goal is to make operative drought monitoring based on merged products at near real-time so that it can be implemented in the national and UE scale warning systems.
Implementation steps include:  
Compilation of different soil moisture datasets (i.e. different types of remote sensing: active and passive soil moisture data, model-based soil moisture data)
Merging methods are tested to provide the best-performing option over different climate types and hydrological regimes
Validation is done against in-situ soil moisture.
Recorded talks (ordered chronologically):
"Drought monitoring across scales with open soil moisture remote sensing data" by Jaime Gaona, Open-Earth-Monitor — Global Workshop 2024;
Technical info
Visit the use-case page on the OEMC website to learn more: https://earthmonitor.org/global-drought-monitoring-at-high-resolution/