Our drought cascade forecasting system is currently based on hydrological model initialization from meteorological model output, providing soil moisture forecasts at 30 days as lead time and obtaining useful information for irrigation decision and management procedures. Two fundamental meteorological fields are available every two days: temperature and precipitation provided at 12-hour intervals as driving input into the hydrological model for soil moisture simulations. The hydrological model is initialized with a simulation run forced with observed data, provided by the ARPA Lombardia and Meteonetworkmeteo. it meteorological station network to create the initial conditions.
In addition to observed and forecasted data, the knowledge of scheduled irrigation dates are
fundamental to calculate the irrigation water input over the experimental field of Livraga.