Monitoring Meteorological Drought with Standardized Precipitation and Satellite Rainfall Product

Abstract

Monitoring and predicting meteorological drought requires long multidecadal time-series data in order to compute the associated distribution and statistics. The satellite based gridded rainfall products which are routinely updated in near real-time are useful to provide long time-series datasets for such purposes. It compliments the spatially scarce and missing values troubled rain gauge station monitoring network to provide sufficient spatio-temporal coverage for drought monitoring and prediction purposes. Coupled with the use of standardized precipitation index (SPI), this combination offers an efficient tool to monitor and drought condition over Peninsular Malaysia. 

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