Dear Hongshuo,

with the present strong El_Nino signal, rought prediction is reasonably well possible.

Particularly American sites are active:

International Research Institute for Climate and Society, iri.columbia.edu/

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/

together with

Climate Prediction Centre, NOAA

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/expert_assessment/sdo_summary.php

Furthermore, there are

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, National Drought Mitigation Centre

http://drought.unl.edu/DroughtBasics/PredictingDrought.aspx

http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/supplementalinfo/forecasts.aspx

The Global Integrated Drought Monitoring and Prediction Centre, Irvine, California

http://drought.eng.uci.edu/

US Drought Portal (Integration)

https://www.drought.gov/drought/content/products-forecasting/improved-drought-prediction

But there is something from Southern Africa as well, Mail and Guardian (South Africa)

http://mg.co.za/article/2015-09-24-00-drought-predictions-for-southern-Africa

Like IRI, they sometimes give the ensemble models used and their spread. Almost everywhere there is mapping. IRI gives global ENSO based maps.

Best wishes, Kees

First sentence: "drought prediction"! KS

Thanks that's really helpful

It depends where the drought is located.  If SE Asia to the Middle East, then the Dust Cloud play a major role in producing or creating drought, and by monitoring their positions on a daily basis, can very accurately predict drought for that part of the world. See the Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System (NAAPS) --go to the NAAPS current, then click on the region you are interested.  For India for example, click on http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/shared-bin/display_image.cgi?URL=/aerosol_web/globaer/ops_01/india/current.gif.

Whenever you see an area covered by the atmospheric dust, it is unlikely that rainfall can reach that area, and the Dust Cloud is resistant to tropical cyclones, and can eat Category 5s like candy.  You can see today for example, that India is covered by what I call the Arabia-Pakistan Dust Cloud, just to give each cloud a name, and that cloud has existed for about 5,500 years influencing the weather in that area.  

However in the last year, the Arabia-Pakistan Dust Cloud has migrated eastward over parts of India and that migration look permanent, so may need to rename that as the Arabia-Pakistan Dust Cloud

You can see the battle between the Category 5 cyclone GONU and the Dust Cloud two different ways at http://www.ecoseeds.com/GONU.html and http://www.ecoseeds.com/GONU3.html.  I have a lot of questions about the Dust Clouds if you search the Research Gate QUESTIONS for the topic "Dust Cloud".

As you can see in the NAAPS image, there is a tremendous atmospheric smoke produced by the burning of tropical forests, planet-wide, and there is a probable connection to droughts also that will be discovered in the future, like the elimination of the Pseudomonas-host trees that produce the rain clouds themselves.

And living here in California under ten years of continuous drought so far and our fifth largest river, the Salinas, has not flowed to the ocean for three out of the last four year, the El Nino and La Nina do have an small effect on droughts, but it is becoming overwhelmed by the other human-induced climate modifiers like the cutting of the Pseudomonas host trees in Indonesia and Malaysia to plant palm oils plantations, or the overgrazing of lands where the Dust Clouds originate. 

If anyone reading this answer studying in the China to Arabia part of the world, and is able to confirm that my Dust Cloud and drought connection exists, please let me know.

Correction--rename the Dust Cloud as the Arabia-India Dust Cloud.

Thanks Craig, that's really interesting!  I want to know whether the dust cloud is caused by anthropogenic or natural forcings. will it affect the short-term (monthly) or long-term(yearly) drought?

The atmospheric Dust Clouds at the latitudes from China to Morocco are all man-made starting 5,500 years ago by the domesticated grazing animals and dry land cereal farming in arid areas, like we did here in the USA in the 1930s in the Dust Bowl area and the crops and soil blew away.  

Of course Global Warming is going to increase the extent of the Dust Clouds, and that is exactly what is happening in India over the last year.  Previously, the Arabia-Pakistan Dust Cloud easternmost extent was the India-Pakistan border, and you can see this by going through the NAAPS daily archives that go back to 2007.

The Dust Clouds creates drought wherever it exists, on an hourly, daily, monthly and yearly basis in the China to Morocco area.  Attached is today's China dust cloud and smoke from Indonesia and Malaysia.  I am very concerned that the Dust Clouds and the smoke of the burning Pseudomonas host trees, plus global warming, may join together to destroy whole civilizations, impacting billions of people.

Like it did when the Indus Valley Civilization grazed the land to desert, and chopped down all of the Pseudomonas-host trees to bake the bricks for their 1,000 cities, then they all had to leave and their cities were forgotten for thousands of years, and we still cannot read their script.

So if the Dust Cloud settles over India for a few years, creating a civilization-ending drought, where would the billion people of India move to?    All the talk and research on Global Warming has been interesting, but when the Dust Clouds and burning of the Pseudomonas Host trees are factored in, we may be on a knifes edge of change toward permanent, civilization-ending drought in parts of the world, including California.

Dear Craig, Many thanks for your information. It is intersting.

Thanks craig!  The information you offered is really good tutorial on dust cloud.

I hope you can offer us more info on drought monitoring in the future. 

If you overlay the daily Dust Cloud NAAPS images and its interactions with the monsoon moisture between India and Arabia, you see that the lowest amount of atmospheric dust that can be detected by the NAAPS daily mapping, which is only 20 microgram per cubic meter, can divert, block or absorb the rain clouds that are trying to bring rainfall to an area.

Then if you look at where the Dust Cloud is not being created because native vegetation still covers the soil, like the 5 mile by 50 mile stretch of vegetation in the mountains above Salalah, Oman, then the rains can cone every year, instead of being the barren desert that the Dust Cloud creates, for five hundred miles in every direction.   Image attached from space, and on the ground, from Salalah and more images at http://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html.

So to permanently cure drought, outside of farmlands, all of the soil needs to be covered with native vegetation so that the soil never gets airborne.  And even in farmlands, no-till agriculture should be practices, so that there is always a cover of mulch keeping the soil in place.  

That means if you have a shrubland for example, there should be a solid cover of perennial native grasslands and broadleaf herbaceous perennials in between the shrubs, to keep the soil from getting airborne.

Any time you allow the dust to get airborne, you are risking drought.  This idea can be tested on a very small scale, by replanting an area with local native plants that is in the path of the India monsoon moisture and currently barren desert, and see how much you can increase the annual rainfall.  I am speculating that you could go from 5-8 cm a year to as much as 50-80 cm a year or more.  

Unless you are in a mountain rain shadow like the west side of the Andes, if moisture is streaming over you each year, but no rainfall is being produced like in Arabia, Pakistan, North Africa, Iran, Iraq, etc., you can start to end the 5,500 year man-made drought by replanting the local native plants.

At http://www.ecoseeds.com/cool.html I write a sort of flow chart and equation to determine if your drought is man-made or not, or if you think of it in reverse, you can calculate if rain should be falling in an area if you have a particular set of conditions.  

By linking the Dust Cloud position, the water vapor presence and the barometric pressure.  So if the Dust Cloud is absent and the barometer drops below 30.00 inches, then for every 0.10 inch below 30.00 inches you should have an increasing number of inches of rainfall per day.  If the Dust Cloud is present, any barometer drop below 30.00 will usually only produce stronger and stringer dust storms, which in turn feedback to continue the drought.

  And the barometer for every 0.10 inch above 30.00 also indicates a stronger drought and when coupled with the Dust Cloud presence will produce conditions very difficult for rainfall to break through.  

Then we have the Pseudomonas factor to include in the climate model, where rain clouds are formed by the Pseudomonas bacteria living on plant leaves, and when we chop down those forests in Indonesia and Malaysia or India, or graze those broadleaf native perennial Pseudomonas-host plants from the grasslands of Mongolia and California, have we wrecked the rainfall cycle and put ourselves in a position of permanent drought, until those host-plants are replanted?

If you search for QUESTIONS on Research Gate for Pseudomonas+rain you will see a lot of questions and comments I have posted along with some satellite pictures of the Pseudomonas clouds being produced by the tropical forest trees.

I am not a computer climate modeler myself, only a weather observer for three decades, but if the Dust Clouds were factored into current climate models, then the atmospheric dust interactions could be seen as being one of the strongest weather factors on the planet.  And our elimination of the Pseudomonas host plants' impact on creating drought faster than Global Warming or other factors. 

Hello, at the European Commission, we are currently working on that, please take a look to :

Lavaysse, C., Vogt, J., and Pappenberger, F.: Early warning of drought in Europe using the monthly ensemble system from ECMWF, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 19, 3273-3286, doi:10.5194/hess-19-3273-2015, 2015.

At regional scale it has been developed and maintained a prototype to cope such adverse condition in Italy. Atmospheric and ecosystem indicators were forecasted and analyzed to contribute to the early warning system. 

Here a reference: Magno, R., Angeli, L., Chiesi, M., and Pasqui, M.: Prototype of a drought monitoring and forecasting system for the Tuscany region, Adv. Sci. Res., 11, 7-10, doi:10.5194/asr-11-7-2014, 2014.

Here the realtime climate service:

http://www.lamma.rete.toscana.it/siccita-situazione-corrente

Great！@Massimiliano

http://drought.eng.uci.edu/

This websites is really good in drought monitoring and prediction.

This group is led by Prof. Amir AghaKouchak in UCI.

Dear Hongshuo,

   Drought prediction is fairly high at monthly time scales (based upon regional results from Europe and USA; I am less familiar with results from China); this is also true, relatively speaking, globally.  However, beyond a month, as was mentioned above, regional differences in prediction skill begin to appear (results with ECMWF forecasts and the North American multimodel ensemble); skill scores then decline rapidly.  The subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction problem for extremes is a hot research issue at present.

Cheers!

Sure. ECMWF provide weather prediction at different temporal scales. however the data reliability have large variations in some areas.

Completely agree with you Hongsuo !