Designing and selecting efficient early warning strategies and increasing their efficiencies in monocropping

Abstract

Monocropping often needs protection from weather and climate hazards. A sufficiently early and reliable signal of impending adverse conditions could permit actions on the part of the planners and decision makers to devise weather related coping strategies and thus palliate the negative environmental impacts of a poor agricultural season. Farmers have to be ready to adapt to the range and frequency of shocks that extreme meteorological events bring and they have to be made able to apply the available technical knowledge and information to develop their coping strategies (e.g. Rathore and Stigter 2007). Since 1989, the National Agricultural Drought Assessment and Monitoring System (NADAMS) in India has been providing biweekly drought bulletins which describe prevalence, relative severity level, and persistence through the crop growing season (Box III.2.17). © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.