Monitoring Agricultural Drought in the Near East - Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought: A Global Study - page 217

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Line
——
-0.6
——
Norm
PgEn

Figure 16.6 Relative production fluctuations of barley in the major producing countries of
West Asia (from FAOSTAT, 2002).

tremendous diversity in agroecological conditions and livelihood systems,
such information is vital for assessing the vulnerability to and potential
impact of drought. In any drought monitoring system, meteorological ser-
vices play a critical role. Without meteorological data and analytical tools
to transform these data into relevant drought indicators, droughts cannot
be adequately monitored. In most countries of the Near East, the meteo-
rological networks are adequate and well equipped and represent major
agroecological and agricultural production areas. Nevertheless, improve-
ments are always possible, especially in highly arid zones (De Pauw et al.,
2000). At the moment, meteorological departments of the region are poorly
prepared to function effectively for drought early warning systems due to
inadequate analytical tools required for drought monitoring, unsuitable
information products, and insufficient data sharing.
Most services still define drought as a negative anomaly from normal
precipitation, in terms of absolute or percentile deviations. This informa-
tion is not used to monitor drought, but rather to characterize the climate
during the ongoing year, month, and part of the year or agricultural sea-
son. Well-established drought indicators such as the Palmer drought sever-
ity index (Palmer, 1965) the standardized precipitation index (Guttman,
1998) or deciles (Gibbs and Maher, 1967) are not used for operational
monitoring. Work on developing suitable drought indicators has just be-
gun recently in Morocco (e.g., Yacoubi et al., 1998) and Syria but is not yet
incorporated into operational drought monitoring systems. For the agricul-
tural user community or other stakeholders, there are no regular bulletins

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