Concept
Drought is a complex and slowly evolving natural hazard that can severely impact agriculture, water supply, ecosystems, and economies. To mitigate these risks and enhance preparedness, drought early warning systems are essential. These systems combine various data sources—satellite observations, climate forecasts, hydrological models, and field data—to provide timely and actionable insights.
FutureWater’s drought early warning method is built on a multi-layered approach that includes:
- Monitoring: Using real-time satellite data (e.g. vegetation indices, rainfall anomalies) to detect early signs of drought.
- Modeling: Applying hydrological and agro-climatic models to simulate key indicators such as soil moisture, crop stress, and water availability.
- Forecasting: Incorporating seasonal weather forecasts to anticipate upcoming drought conditions.
- Impact Assessment: Estimating potential consequences for food production, water resources, and natural ecosystems.
- Communication: Delivering user-specific outputs such as alerts, dashboards, and maps for effective decision-making.
This integrated methodology allows stakeholders—from farmers to policy makers—to make informed, proactive decisions in the face of increasing climate variability.
FutureWater Applications
FutureWater designs and implements drought early warning systems tailored to local conditions and user needs, with successful applications in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Our solutions are adaptable to various climatic regions, data infrastructures, and institutional frameworks.
Among our in-house developments is InfoSequia, a fully operational platform for drought monitoring and forecasting. InfoSequia demonstrates how an integrated and data-driven approach can support early action and drought risk reduction.
In addition to InfoSequia, FutureWater supports governments, water managers, and development organizations in:
- Developing custom drought monitoring tools
- Integrating early warning into agricultural advisory services
- Supporting national drought policies and resilience planning
- Capacity building and training on drought risk management
FutureWater offers the expertise and tools to build effective, science-based early warning systems that support sustainable water and agricultural management under drought conditions.
Our In-House Tools & Services
InfoSequia: Drought Monitoring and Forecasting
InfoSequia is a powerful tool for proactive drought monitoring and forecasting. By integrating satellite data, machine learning, and real-time analytics, it delivers precise, impact-based insights to help decision-makers mitigate water scarcity and agricultural risks effectively.
Related projects
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NbS for Drought Resilience in Latin America
Under this project, FutureWater supports the World Bank to fill an existing knowledge gap regarding the applicability and potential effectiveness of Nature-based Solutions to reduce risks of droughts, with a focus on Latin America. A set of NbS factsheets and an inventory of useful tools were compiled by exploring a...
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Megadroughts in Europe’s Watertowers – From Process Understanding to Strategies for Management and Adaptation
Megadroughts are rare and poorly understood hazards. They are defined as exceptionally severe, multi-year, prolonged (>5 years) periods of drought that impact severely large areas and different sectors of the economy and the environment (Cook et al., 2022). They are generally caused by the concurrence of extreme events of dryness...
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Increasing Investments in Early Warning Systems to Strengthen Climate and Disaster Resilience
This project aims to support the development of a new multi-hazard Early Warning System (EWS) facility, addressing the significant exposure of countries in Asia and the Pacific region to disaster risks. The enhancement of EWS aligns with global commitments, such as the Paris Agreement, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), Sustainable Development...
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GLOW: Global Water Availability Forecasting Service to Support Water Security
The GLOW project aims to pilot an operational service that provides timely and easy access to current and forecasted water availability and demand across the entire Maputo River and the Black Umbeluzi River Basins.
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InfoSequia-4CAST: Forecasting and Quantifying Risks of Crop and Water Supply Failures Using Machine Learning and Remote Sensing
InfoSequia-4CAST combines historical and up-to-date observations of satellite-based meteorological and agricultural drought indices with climate variability indices, to generate seasonal outlooks of water supply and crop yield failure alerts. These impact-based indicators are computed using a simple, robust and easily understandable statistical forecasting-modelling framework. By making use of multi-sensor, state-of-the...
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G3P: Development of a Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product
Groundwater is one of the most important freshwater resources for mankind and for ecosystems, and has been declared as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) by GCOS, the Global Climate Observing System. However, the Copernicus Services do not yet deliver data on this fundamental resource, nor is there any other data...
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TWIGA: Transforming Weather Water data into value-added Information services for sustainable Growth in Africa
TWIGA aims to provide actionable geo-information on weather, water, and climate in Africa through innovative combinations of new in situ sensors and satellite-based geo-data. With the foreseen new services, TWIGA expects to reach twelve million people within the four years of the project, based on sustainable business models. The TWIGA...
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HERMANA: Tool for Integrated Water Management
HERMANA aims to foster the development of an integrated water management decision support system (DSS) that supports daily, tactical and strategic decision-making related to water resources in Colombia, and specifically in the Cauca Valley Basin. The HERMANA tool will be a comprehensive system able to provide valuable, relevant, and reliable...
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DRR: Technical Assistance on Drought Information and Early Warning Systems
To address the recent drought problems in Bolivia, FutureWater and Deltares have been asked to provide recommendations on drought early warning and drought information systems, both on technical aspects as well as on institutional issues. The Dutch Risk Reduction Team has held stakeholder consultations with the Ministry of Environment and...
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IMPREX: IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes
FutureWater leads the coordination of the “Agriculture and Drought” sectoral Work Package of IMPREX. This WP specifically aims to study and evaluate the use of IMPREX weather forecasts and predictions, climate variability, and drought indicators to assess agricultural drought risk and impacts over four case studies and at the pan-European...
