The Division of Agronomy at the University of Göttingen will contribute to the overall objective by (i) coordinating the project network, (ii) developing operational seasonal drought forecasts for irrigated and rainfed agriculture and integrating the forecasting system into the overall multi-sectoral forecasting system, and (iii) systematically evaluating the multi-sectoral forecasting system on a global scale as well as on a regional scale in collaboration with the regional pilot users. Project coordination includes the overall coordination and activities of the sub-projects, monitoring of project progress, ensuring efficient and targeted communication between project partners as well as with pilot users, project funders (reporting), and the public. In addition to the kickoff workshop, 4 project workshops are planned, of which the validation workshop and the results and transfer workshop will be organized by the subproject at the University of Göttingen. The simulation of drought hazards in irrigated and rainfed agriculture will be based on the preliminary work in the GlobeDrought project by applying the Global Crop Water Model (GCWM). We have developed methods and data sets to analyze crop water requirements, crop drought stress and water use in agriculture, including the GCWM. We will further redesign the GCWM to calculate actual and potential evapotranspiration of 26 groups of irrigated and rainfed crops representing all crops grown worldwide, in daily time steps at 5 arc-minute spatial resolution. This model will be further developed to an operational forecasting system to provide, in monthly time steps, ensemble forecasts for the upcoming 6 months. Tools will be developed for an automated processing of model outputs to calculate optimized drought hazard indicators developed within the OUTLAST project together with regional pilot users.
Working Group
 | Prof. Dr. Stefan Siebert Project leader Head of the Division of Agronomy  stefan.siebert@uni-goettingen.de |
 | Neda Abbasi Scientific researcher neda.abbasi@agr.uni-goettingen.de |
 | Malte Weller Graduate forester Technical staff – programmer malte.weller@uni-goettingen.de |