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Ecology & Environment
Mahesh

06/11/22 17:20 PM IST

South Asia Drought Monitoring System (SADMS)

In News 
  • A new satellite-based drought-monitoring tool will be able to indicate the presence of drought and its level of severity, providing authorities with the maximum possible lead time to put mitigation strategies into place in India and across South Asia.
SADMS 
  • In India, the South Asia Drought Monitoring System (SADMS) was developed by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the country’s premier agricultural research institution.
  • It has been tested in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives, Afghanistan and Bhutan.
  • The system will not just monitor the drought conditions but also incorporate this information of real-time weather updates and open-access satellite data, and provide extension workers as well as agriculture and water resources authorities with all the information needed to forecast, monitor and manage drought on a weekly basis.
  • IWMI has been testing SADMS by validating it at the district level.
  • The input data comes into the platform from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM).
  • This includes soil moisture, precipitation, temperature, wind speed and available cloud ratio. The scientists will also factor in historical droughts and their conditions.
Benefits to farmers 
  • It will help the farmers to decide which crops to grow.
  • During the drought seasons, they can choose to grow drought-tolerant crops like millet over water-intensive crops like rice.
  • The platform is already in operation in the state of Telangana.
  • From 2017, ICAR used SADMS to implement real-time contingency measures.
  • It helped farmers in three districts of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra to obtain drought-tolerant seeds, develop supplementary irrigation and apply potassium nitrate (which helps seedlings cope better with dry conditions).
Source- DTE 

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