On Thursday, March 24th 2016, Anna Borghi from Università Statale di Milano will give a talk about Drought and water scarcity indices in agriculture at Politecnico di Milano – DEIB seminar room, 10.30 am.
Abstract
Drought (D) is a spatially extensive occurrence of below-average natural water availability. Water scarcity (WS) describes a situation of recurrent water imbalance, where water abstraction exceeds the level of water resources exploitable under sustainable conditions. Recent EU documents show that by 2030 water scarcity shall affect many areas in Europe actually characterized by large water availability but also by high water consumption, such as the Po River Plain. The European Drought Observatory (EDO) regularly generates and distributes through its web-site maps of meteorological and agricultural drought indicators through all the EU, generated considering rainfed agriculture. In southern Europe, however , irrigation may compensate for potentially severe agricultural droughts, and WS indicators would thus be important for decision making on water resources management. In the seminar, the state of the art of the monitoring and assessment of WS&D over agricultural areas will be examined, and an ongoing research aimed at developing a set of indicators for the monitoring, management and prevention of WS&D phenomena suitable for irrigated areas will be presented.
Short Bio
Anna Borghi is a PhD student at the Universita? degli Studi di Milano. Her work focus mainly on the assessment of water scarcity and droughts in agriculture, by the synergic use of hydrological models and earth observation information.