Developing a combined drought-dzud early warning system in Mongolia

Abstract

Among natural disasters, drought affected the most people worldwide during the past few decades. Since the late 1970s, there has been a shift in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation toward more warm events, closely related to a worldwide trend for intensified drought. Pastoral animal husbandry, a major industry in Mongolia, has repeatedly suffered from drought and dzud (cold-season disaster) due to its dry, cold climate. The present paper provides an overview of existing drought early warning systems (EWSs) and their operation and research in Mongolia related to meteorological disasters. A possible EWS suitable for the Mongolian environment and socioeconomy is then proposed. Although state-of-the-art long-range weather forecasting has not yet produced reliable quantitative information, timely and accurate monitoring of the climate memory of land-surface anomaly conditions (such as soil moisture, pasture, and livestock) that resulted, with a time lag, from summer deficit rainfall will enable us to deliver early warnings of possible drought and dzud and finally to mitigate their effects on animal husbandry.