<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Soil moisture is an important parameter in many fields: hydrological, agricultural and even natural hazards monitoring (like floods). And, since soil moisture is crucial to flood monitoring a soil moisture spatial mission was launched in the 2nd November 2009: Soil Moisture And Ocean Salinity (SMOS). In this context, two Moroccan flood events are considered: November 2014 floods at Guelmim and Sidi Ifni and 23rd February 2017 floods at Rabat and Salé. The methodology is based on the combination of the observation of two parameters: soil moisture (satellite data) and rainfall data (in-situ and satellite-based data) in order to have a vision of the flood risk in Morocco in the future with the comparison of Rainfall and soil moisture maps before and after the flood events. Among the main results, a strong relation between soil moisture and floods was detected for the November 2014 floods (for Guelmim soil moisture reached 0.6&thinsp;m3/m3 on 20 and 21 November 2014) and between Rainfall amount and floods for the 23 February 2017 floods (119&thinsp;mm on the day of the flood event).</p>
Drought is an extreme event that has hit several countries in the world including Morocco. The aim of this research was to assess drought in Morocco with a view to providing information for planning and management of droughts. For this, three drought indices were chosen: Combined Drought Indicator (CDI), Soil Moisture Agricultural Drought Index (SMADI), and Microwave Integrated Drought Index (MIDI). Drought monitor was done during the growing seasons of 2010-2020 using Earth Observation data and cloud computing with the mapping of the drought indices and their inter-comparing via Pearson correlation. The main drought events were tracked and drought characteristics analyzed. Seven drought years were tracked for regions of cereal production. CDI and MIDI were very well correlated, whereas SMADI showed poor correlation with CDI and MIDI. Validation of results was done by comparing our results with another study for the 2015-2016 drought event and comparing yearly precipitation with the long-term average. An Earth Engine App of the three indices was published to make public drought maps.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.