Propose to develop a global agricultural monitoring tool, with a focus on providing early warning of developing vegetation stress for agricultural decision-makers and stakeholders at relatively high…

This federal contract award (NNX17AH48G) was granted to the University of Maryland, College Park by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop a global agricultural monitoring tool focused on providing early warning of vegetation stress. The $149,835.97 grant aims to leverage NASA's Evaporative Stress Index (ESI) and integrate additional data sources like microwave land surface temperature retrievals to enhance drought monitoring capabilities. The tool will serve stakeholders at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture, and the G20 GEOGLAM Crop Monitor initiative. This effort builds upon an existing NASA-supported project that has transitioned the ESI system into operational use by NOAA. The contract has no set-aside designation, and the University of Maryland is a subcomponent of the University System of Maryland, which has a history of supporting federal R&D initiatives across various agencies.

Propose to develop a global agricultural monitoring tool, with a focus on providing early warning of developing vegetation stress for agricultural decision-makers and stakeholders at relatively high spatial resolution (5-KM). This tool is based on remotely sensed estimates of evapotranspiration, retrieved via energy balance principals using observations of land surface temperature. The evaporative stress index (ESI) represents anomalies in the ratio of actual-topotential ET generated with the thermal remote sensing based atmosphere-land exchange inverse (alexi) surface energy balance model. The LST inputs to ESI have been shown to provide early warning information about the development of vegetation stress with stresselevated canopy temperatures observed well before a decrease in greenness is detected in remotely sensed vegetation indices. Whereas many drought indicators based on precipitation or atmospheric conditions capture meteorological drought, the ESI is one of few indicators of agricultural drought that reveals actual vegetation stress conditions realized on the ground. As a diagnostic indicator of actual ET, the ESI requires no information regarding antecedent precipitation or soil moisture storage capacity - the current available moisture to vegetation is deduced directly from the remotely sensed LST signal. This signal also inherently accounts for both precipitation and non-precipitation related inputs/sinks to the plant-available soil moisture pool (e.g., irrigation, tile drainage) which can modify crop response to rainfall anomalies. Independence from precipitation data is a benefit for global agricultural monitoring applications due to sparseness in existing ground-based precipitation networks, and time delays in public reporting. Even as satellite precipitation monitoring has closed some of the observational gaps, these data are usually provided at coarse resolution with accuracy dependent on extensive calibration with ground-based precipitation estimates. This project will leverage an expiring NASA applied sciences water resources project which successfully developed and transitioned into operations an ESI system over north america. This ESI system is operationally maintained by the NOAA office of satellite and product operations (ospo) and provides operational products to end-users at the national drought mitigation center, the USDA hydrology and remote sensing lab and nass, USGS and the NOAA climate prediction center and environmental modeling center. Here, we propose a global 5-KM ESI product system, called the ESI global drought product system (ESI-gdps) which will be built on the foundational get-d framework at NOAA-ospo. Several enhancements to the current ESI framework will be addressed as requested from project stakeholders: (a) integration of all-sky MW KA-band LST retrievals to augment clear-sky thermal-only ESI in persistently cloudy regions; (b) operational production of ESI rapid change indices which provide important early warning information related to onset of actual vegetation stress; and (c) assessment of ESI as a predictor of global yield anomalies; initial studies have shown the ability of intra-seasonal ESI to provide an early indication of at-harvest agricultural yield anomalies. The ESI-gdps will serve the decision support needs of the three primary project stakeholders: the USDA foreign agricultural service, the international center for biosaline agriculture s mena regional drought management system and the G20 geoglam crop monitor initiative for the agricultural market information system (amis) and for early warning.