article · ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS RESEARCH
Drought is a recurrent and severe challenge in Ethiopia, where ground-based precipitation observations are scarce and unevenly distributed. Satellite rainfall estimates offer a viable alternative when their accuracy is established. An evaluation of the Climate Hazard Group Infrared Precipitation with Station version 2 (CHIRPSv2) daily rainfall product was conducted across six Ethiopian river basins: Awash, Blue Nile, Baro, Danakil, Omo, and Tekeze. Using the Effective Drought Index and the Standardized Precipitation Index, the dataset successfully identified all major historical drought events between 1982 and 2016. Droughts predominantly occurred during principal and secondary rainy seasons, with higher frequency and severity noted during the 1980s and 2000s compared to the 1990s. The indices accurately captured both severe drought years and drought-free periods, showing strong agreement with historical records. Consequently, the satellite data proves viable for developing operational drought monitoring and early warning systems across Ethiopian river basins.
Reliable drought monitoring is vital for protecting agriculture, water supplies, and rural livelihoods in climate-vulnerable regions. In areas where physical weather stations are scarce, validating satellite rainfall data provides an accessible way to track water deficits. Establishing that satellite datasets accurately match historical drought events enables regional authorities to implement timely mitigation measures, improve early warning capabilities, and build resilience against future climate shocks.
This work demonstrates an applied, validated approach that can support the development of operational drought monitoring and early warning software platforms. The primary users would be environmental agencies, river basin authorities, and disaster risk managers seeking to plan adaptation and mitigation interventions. As the study validates existing satellite datasets and standard indices against historical data, translation into public or commercial environmental monitoring services represents an applied development stage rather than early-stage discovery.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
Abstract Background Drought is a recurrent phenomenon emerging from an inter-annual and intra-seasonal deficit of water across the atmosphere-to-aquifer continuum and these events are reported to be very severe in regions of Ethiopia. Availability of accurate precipitation observations significantly impacts the drought monitoring systems. These observations are scarce and sparsely distributed in countries like Ethiopia. To overcome such a problem, the use of satellite rainfall estimates with continuous and timely data at different spatio-temporal scales is opportune, provided their accuracy is well known. Among the currently available satellite rainfall products studies specifically in Ethiopia shown that Climate Hazard Group Infrared Precipitation with Station version 2 daily rainfall product (hereafter CHIRPSv2) has better performance and recommended as a valuable substitute for gauge rainfall data. Therefore, the current study focused on assessing the applicability of CHIRPSv2 for meteorological drought monitoring in Ethiopia. Due to the wide spatio-temporal variability of Ethiopia's climate, the performance of CHIRPSv2 rainfall product for meteorological drought monitoring has been assessed in selected river basins (Awash, Blue Nile, Baro, Danakil, Omo and Tekeze) of Ethiopia. For drought estimations, two well-known meteorological drought indices such as Effective Drought Index (EDI) and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) have been utilized. Result The obtained results show that the CHIRPSv2 based EDI and SPI are able to identify all the historical drought events reported between 1982 and 2016 (such as 1984, 1992, 2003, 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2015). The time series plots of EDI and SPI values show that most of the drought events in the selected river basins occurred during their corresponding main and smaller rainy months. Detailed spatio-temporal investigations of the two worst drought years (1984 and 2011) and one drought-free year (2007) show that both the EDI and SPI could enable to identify the drought and drought-free areas correctly when compared with the available recorded historical droughts (RHD) across each river basin. Similarly, the temporal trends of EDI and SPI identified drought shows that frequency and severity of drought were higher during 1980s and 2000s than 1990s. Conclusions Such good agreement between the identified drought and historical drought indicates that CHIRPSv2 is a promising rainfall dataset, which could be used to develop drought monitoring and early warning system across different river basins of Ethiopia. Besides, the study helps to provide useful information for decision makers to implement different adaptation and mitigation measures of drought in the study area. The finding also will support to improve the existing drought monitoring and early warning system and to build resilience to drought at the river basin level.
This page summarises published work. The authoritative version sits with the publisher.
DOI: 10.1186/s40068-022-00251-x
Is something wrong with this record? Report it or request removal.
Discussion
Have you built on this work, tried to replicate it, or seen it applied in practice? Share what you know. Verified researchers and MARATTO™ domain experts can open a discussion, and any member can reply. Contributions are reviewed before they appear.
No discussion yet. Open the first thread.
New to MARATTO™? Create a free account.
