Modelling the impacts of global multi-scale climatic drivers on hydro-climatic extremes (1901-2014) over the Congo basin.

The knowledge of interactions between oceanic and atmospheric processes and associated influence on drought episodes is a key step toward designing robust measure that could support government and institutional measures for drought preparedness to promote region-specific drought risk-management policy solutions. This has become necessary for the Congo basin where the preponderance of evidence from few case studies shows long-term drying and hydro-climatic extremes attributed to perturbations of the nearby oceans. In this study, statistical relationships are developed between observed standardised precipitation index (SPI) and global sea surface temperature using principal component analysis as a regularization tool prior to the implementation of a canonical scheme.

The Future of Earth Observation in Hydrology.

In just the past five years, the field of Earth observation has progressed beyond the offerings of conventional space agency based platforms to include a plethora of sensing opportunities afforded by CubeSats, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and smartphone technologies that are being embraced by both for-profit companies and individual researchers. Over the previous decades, space agency efforts have brought forth well-known and immensely useful satellites such as the Landsat series and the Gravity Research and Climate Experiment (GRACE) system, with costs typically on the order of one billion dollars per satellite and with concept-to-launch timelines on the order of two decades (for new missions). More recently, the proliferation of smartphones has helped to miniaturise sensors and energy requirements, facilitating advances in the use of CubeSats that can be launched by the dozens, while providing ultra-high (3-5 m) resolution sensing of the Earth on a daily basis.