Web-service-based monitoring and analysis of global agricultural drought

It is of great importance and an urgent demand to enable operational and near real-time monitoring and analysis of global agricultural drought at desirable spatial and temporal resolutions. Traditional approaches and existing systems are not able to meet the demand because of big-data and geoprocessing-modeling challenges. The latest advances in Web service, geospatial interoperability and cyberinfrastruc-ture technologies and the availability of near real-time global remote sensing data have shown potential to address the challenges and meet the demand. This paper presents a Web service approach to building the Global Agricultural Drought Monitoring and Forecasting System (GADMFS), an open, interoperable, and on-demand geospatial Web service system, for meeting the demand. The big-data and geoprocessing-modeling issues in providing complete agricultural drought information are resolved in GADMFS through improved data-, service- and system-level interoperability and servability. GADMFS is able to overcome major limitations of current drought information systems in the world and better support decision making with improved global agricultural drought data and information dissemination and analysis services.