Review of Drought Monitoring and Forecast in Inner Mongolia and Construction of an Intelligent Drought Platform

Research on monitoring and early warning of drought in Inner Mongolia is important for ecosystem conservation. The current study and the existing deficiencies in drought monitoring and forecasting, especially in pastoral areas of Inner Mongolia have been reviewed. The structure and function of the Self-developed Inner Mongolia Drought Intelligent Platform were also been presented. Results show that drought monitoring is mainly based on the drought indices, which include the meteorological indices and remote sensing monitoring indices. Most of the meteorological indices focus on precipitation and evapotranspiration, which have not considered the conditions of effects of soil moisture and vegetation status on drought stress. The composite drought index for pastoral areas has been studied, but its generalizability needs further exploration. Remote sensing drought monitoring makes up for the problems on the scale of meteorological monitoring but is affected by the large-scale accuracy, and it is necessary to research the coupling of multi-remote sensing data or the coupling of ground and remote sensing. Numerical and statistical forecasting methods are chiefly used for drought forecasting, however, there are still some discrepancies in realizing accurate dynamic prediction of drought at present. The Self-developed Inner Mongolia Drought Intelligent Platform includes drought monitoring, prediction, drought risk, and resilience assessment, which strongly support the operational application of drought prevention and disaster mitigation in Inner Mongolia.