Msc. Research Topics

The 2018 and 2019 droughts in Twente

WCC

Potential supervisors

Rogier van der Velde, Christiaan van der Tol, Suhyb Salama

Spatial Engineering

This topic is adaptable to Spatial Engineering and it covers the following core knowledge areas:

Spatial Planning for Governance (SPG)
Spatial Information Science (SIS)
Technical Engineering (TE)

Suggested Electives

Additional Remarks

Description

Drought is a phenomena that affects regions and societies in many different ways. The quantification of the drought severity remains, as such, inherently complicated as at a particular level it is not perceived as stress by one part of society while it is by another. Also, the methods for quantifying droughts from both in-situ measurements and remote sensing observations are under debate and additional research is required.

The Water Resources department of the Faculty of ITC operates since 2009 a network consisting of 19 stations in the Twente region where soil moisture and temperature is being measured at nominal depths of 5, 10, 20, 40, and 80 cm. The Twente soil moisture monitoring network has also collected during the record dry summers of 2018 and 2019 its data and it will be the student’s task to analyze the severity of 2018 and 2019 droughts and investigate how this best can be monitored with remote sensing-based indices.

Objectives and Methodology

The objective of this MSc research topic is to quantity the severity of the 2018 and 2019 droughts using the profile soil moisture measurements collected in Twente and assess whether remote sensing-based drought indices are able to correctly represent the drought severity reconstructed from the in-situ measurements.

The methodology that is expected to be followed includes the:
* Quantification of the 2018 and 2019 drought severity based on the profile soil moisture measurements collected at 19 locations in Twente. Spatial Engineering students could make a distinction between the different types of drought, e.g. meteorological, agricultural, hydrological.
* Construction of drought indices from the readily available remote sensing data products and where needed complemented by ancillary data, e.g. soil and land cover,
* Comparison of the drought indices derived from the in-situ measurements with the remote sensing based indices. Spatial Engineering students could emphasize on the evaluating, which index is suitable to evaluate which type of drought.