Development of an Expert System for Daily Drought Monitoring

Abstract

A daily drought-monitoring system was developed using the Clips Expert System software package. The monitoring system consists of four components: (1) the knowledge base, which contains rules in the form of IF-THEN type for the decision of assigning a daily drought severity; (2) the working memory which contains facts of historic drought characteristics including truncation levels, mean durations, and mean conditional probabilities estimated at gauging stations; (3) the inference engine, which makes inferences to decide what rules are satisfied by current facts for assigning drought-severity levels; and (4) the user interface, which provides the mechanism for communication between the user and the system. A six-month period of the historic drought that started at the beginning of May 1988 in the central Ohio region was used to test the developed system. The developed system was found to detect daily drought occurrences effectively.