Projects

QSECA

It is now widely recognized that the Iberian Peninsula , as part of the Mediterranean basin, corresponds to one of the most sensitive areas to current and future climate change constituting a "hot spot" . The expected decrease in water availability, as a consequence of the precipitation decrease and temperature rise highlights the urge to determine the ecological and environmental impacts of climate variability and change in the Mediterranean region. For a better understanding and improved prediction of extreme events it is crucial to investigate their link with atmospheric weather conditions, especially within the framework of future warming scenarios that indicate an increase in frequent heat waves and severity of drought extremes in the Mediterranean basin .)

The central goal of this proposal is to enhance the knowledge on drought in order to contribute in the drought management and development of drought information tools. We intend to contribute significantly to both diagnosis of droughts and their impacts as well as to the modeling of past, present and future drought events vs. wet periods in IB. There are several aims from the diagnosis perspective, namely the application of recently developed drought indices including SPEI. We also intend to use satellite derived Vegetation Indices (VI) to evaluate the impact of droughts on vegetation, namely the longest time-series of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), as obtained by GIMMS dataset (5).