Famines have long been associated with drought. With the severity of droughts growing in association with climate change, there is increasing pressure to do a better job predicting famines and delivering international aid to avert human suffering and civil instability. We examine recent advances in remote sensing technology, focusing on the latency, historical availability and spatial and temporal scales of the data these satellites provide. Because of their global coverage, seven variables derived from satellite observations emerge as especially pertinent to drought and famine: precipitation (TRMM/GPM), groundwater (GRACE/GRACE‐FO), snow (MODIS), soil moisture (SMOS, SMAP, Sentinel‐1), evapotranspiration (MODIS, ECOSTRESS), vegetation health (Landsat, AVHRR, MODIS, SPOT) and chlorophyll fluorescence (OCO‐2). We discuss tipping point theory as a possible framework for taking advantage of long time series of these satellite data where they exist in order to enhance the effectiveness of existing famine early warning systems.

中文翻译：

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将引爆点理论应用于遥感科学，以改善粮食安全预警干旱信号

饥荒长期以来与干旱有关。随着干旱的严重程度与气候变化相关联，越来越大的压力要求人们更好地预测饥荒并提供国际援助来避免人类遭受的痛苦和内乱。我们研究了遥感技术的最新进展，重点是这些卫星提供的数据的时延，历史可用性以及时空尺度。由于其全球覆盖范围，从卫星观测中得出的七个变量特别与干旱和饥荒有关：降水（TRMM / GPM），地下水（GRACE / GRACE-FO），降雪（MODIS），土壤水分（SMOS，SMAP，前哨） ‐1），蒸散量（MODIS，ECOSTRESS），植被健康（Landsat，AVHRR，MODIS，SPOT）和叶绿素荧光（OCO-2）。