Building an on-demand web service system for Global Agricultural Drought Monitoring and Forecasting

There is an urgent need but remains a very challenging problem to provide worldwide users with timely, on-demand, and ready-to-use agricultural drought data and information. The latest advances in Web service, geospatial interoperability and cyber-infrastructure technologies and the availability of near real-time global remote sensing data promise a solution to the problem. This paper presents the research study of the state of the art, methodology and approaches to building an open, interoperable, on-demand Web service system for global agriculture drought monitoring and forecasting. The implemented system, named as Global Agriculture Drought Monitoring and Forecasting System (GADMFS), overcomes most limitations of current agriculture drought information systems in the world and significantly improves global agriculture drought monitoring, prediction and analysis with advanced geospatial Web service technology.