Nov 21
Turkana drought recovery
Drought is often one of the most devastating but least understood weather phenomena, largely because of its slow onset and its accumulating impacts over time. Although definitions vary depending on the context, drought is generally an extended period of months or years in which precipitation is less than the annual average and results in severe water scarcity (Wilhite 2000; Downing and Bakker 2000; Whetherald and Manabe 2002).
According to the World Meteorological Organization (Hounam et al. 1975), droughts are classified as either meteorological (lack of Precipitation over a region for a period of time), hydrological (a period with inadequate surface and subsurface water resources), agricultural (a period with declining soil moisture and consequent crop failure due to lack of surface water resources), or socioeconomic (failure of water resources systems to meet demands, which impacts human activities both directly and indirectly). The Kenya Meteorological Service (2010) defines normal meteorological drought as a situation in which rainfall over an area is less than 75 % of the climatologically normal (that is, a rainfall deficiency of at least 25 %). This definition is extremely crude as it gives little information about the temporal distribution of rainfall (Wilhite and Glantz 1985). On the other hand, one could define optimal rainfall as sufficient
