Poland: drought main concern on Earth Day

In Poland, the celebrations for World Earth Day were initiated in 1990 and are organized every year on April 22. The motto of this year's celebrations is "Action for climate protection", and environmental activities are to address the challenges of progressive climate change.

Among the biggest challenges that cannot be ignored are: global warming, water deficits or excessive waste production. In this context the climate change can be easily observed by Polish farmers with two previous years with drought hurting the yields in many regions of Poland and this year also with no favorable forecasts.

There are several types of drought: agricultural, hydrological and hydrogeological. According to the analyzes carried out by the Polish Waters, water management authority, 45% of the country's agricultural and forest land is at risk of agricultural drought, mainly in the Wielkopolskie province, part of Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Lubuskie and Mazowieckie provinces. However, hydrological drought threatens as much as 95.4% of the country. The range of areas threatened by hydrogeological drought constitutes 35.6% of Poland's area.

According to the recently published data on drought situation in Poland, in March 2020 it has rained the least for the last 30 years. Across the country, precipitation accounted for 67% of the long-term average, in the belt of central Poland - even below 40 %.

The March rainfall deficit, after this year's extremely low rainfall this winter, causes that there is again a risk of drought in Poland. The current hydro-meteorological situation clearly indicates that activities in the field of small and large retention are necessary to prevent drought and ensure adequate amounts of water to meet the needs of people and the economy (especially agriculture) and the natural environment.

Drought monitoring

For several years now, the Institute of Soil Cultivation and Soil Science (IUNG) has been running in Poland the Agricultural Drought Monitoring System. Its task is to indicate areas where potential yield losses occurred due to drought conditions for crops, as specified in the Act on payments for insurance of agricultural crops and livestock in Poland. In accordance with this Act, drought means damage caused by occurrence in any sixty-day period from March 21 to September 30 of the climatic water balance (KBW) below a specified value for individual species or groups of crop plants and soil categories.

Monitoring of agricultural drought conducted so far by IUNG will be supported this year by the Remote Sensing Center of the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography (IGiK). For several years, this unit has also been conducting its own research on the scale and intensity of agricultural drought in Poland.

The IGiK Remote Sensing Center in Warsaw monitors the state and conditions of crop growth during vegetation. Based on the Terra MODIS satellite images, the developed models use the active surface temperature to estimate the intensity of drought in agricultural areas. The system determines the condition of plants using the DISS (Drought Identification Satellite System) satellite identification indicator. It is a derivative of the TCI (Temperature Condition Index) and meteorological index describing the climatic conditions of Poland - HTC (Hydrothermal Coefficient).


 

Beeld: IGiK

The map from the last report shows the state of drought from 6 to 13 April with a resolution of 1 km2. The values of the DISS indicator are divided into 5 ranges:

    extreme drought (red color)
    drought (orange color)
    average water content (light green)
    good water content (dark green)
    high water content (dark blue)
    ND - not applicable (black)

Snowless and warm winter with moderate rainfall in January and good in February and spring - with average rainfall in March and limited in April so far - prevent soil water storage and retention on a larger scale. The latest map indicates the occurrence of drought in agricultural areas in most regions of Poland. Which is not optimistic, drought at the extreme level has already affected significant areas of the following provinces: Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Wielkopolskie, Dolnoslaskie, Opolskie, Łodzkie, Mazowieckie and Lubelskie.

Source: topagrar.pl, bezpluga.pl, stopsuszy.pl