A drought monitoring and early warning service for food security in South Africa

In this paper we present an operational system for drought monitoring and early warning over South Africa-Lesotho. The indicators used for the alert issuance are based on meteorological, agricultural and hydrological indices, assembled by satellite and reanalysis raw data, to cover for all aspects of drought. The service is operationally updated every 10 days and has a spatial resolution of 10 Km. A severe drought period for South Africa covering the time period 2017–2020 was used to test the performance of the drought system. Our analysis indicated that the service is useful, providing sufficient warning on the onsets of and duration of droughts. Comparison of our results with a South African national drought service indicates a very good agreement in early warning messaging. The service is particularly user friendly and easily transferable to any region worldwide.