Meratch - Drought Early Warning | Catch a flash drought as it forms

Drought in Central Europe has changed character.

Alongside the slow drought that builds over months, there is now flash drought — it develops within a few weeks when heat, strong evaporation and missing rain strike together. Monthly bulletins and rainfall indices catch it late, once crops, urban greenery or a water source are already under stress. It hits municipalities with their own water sources, green-space managers, water utilities and farmers hardest.

Driest in 250 years

2018–2020 was Europe's driest stretch in two and a half centuries, covering more than a third of the continent at once.

Rakovec et al. 2022, Earth's Future

+80% flash droughts

Flash-drought frequency in Central & Eastern Europe rose by more than 80% between 1950–1984 and 1985–2019 — one of the fastest increases worldwide.

Christian et al. 2024, WIREs Water

Once in 20 years

A summer soil drought like 2022 is now a 1-in-20-year event in western and central Europe — once a century in the pre-industrial climate.

Schumacher et al. 2024

We track how dry the land is and how fast it is drying.

Drought early warning system is built on continuous soil-moisture monitoring. We watch two things at once: the soil-moisture percentile and its rate of decline against a 75-year climatology — paired with forecasts from 72 hours out to a full season. We tell long-term drought apart from flash drought, because each calls for different decisions. At pilot sites our own soil-moisture and water-level sensors make the warning valid for a specific park, spring or field, not a whole district.

Measure on the ground & from space

Soil-moisture monitoring and evaporation from satellites and reanalysis; at pilot sites, our own soil-moisture sensors in the ground and in wells.

Assess depth and speed

How deep the drought is and how fast it is getting worse, measured against 75 years of history.

Alert a level + an action

A warning level with a concrete recommended action, days to weeks ahead.

What we bring that's new.

Speed, not just depth

Standard monitors tell you how dry it is. We also track how fast it is drying — so the warning comes while drought is building, not once it has arrived — and we separate flash drought from long-term drought, because they call for different decisions.

Flash drought risk

Extreme
High
Medium
Low
Very low

We measure where satellites can't see

Our own stations read soil moisture at several depths, well levels, spring yield and water quality. Satellites see the surface, not the water in the ground — and in towns, where soil is fill and rubble, nobody can infer it from above.

Meratch soil-moisture sensor installed in the ground

The whole chain in one company

From our own hardware through models and forecasts — 72 hours, 15 days, a full season — to a dashboard with a recommendation for a specific user. No stitching together five vendors.

Meratch sensors beside a laptop showing the dashboard

Drought and flood on one platform

Both rest on the same soil moisture as our Floodar: baked, dry soil sheds the first storm faster. So we also see the drought-to-flash-flood transition, and drought combined with heat.

Meratch mobile app showing a river-basin map

Science you can check

Methods built on the latest literature, a 75-year reference, and risk maps at 250 m for Slovakia and 1 km for Europe. A team of working climatologists, meteorologists and hydrologists — and we already run operational warning networks in the LIFE FLOPRES project in Slovakia and Poland.

Meratch engineer testing sensors in the lab

Built for the people who feel the drought first.

City park with grass scorched by drought

Municipalities & urban green-space managers

Water utilities & municipalities with their own source

Irrigation boom watering rows of young crops

Farmers & agronomists — irrigation planning

Honest about the stage.

Drought risk maps for Europe (1 km) and Slovakia (250 m) are complete, and the flash-drought monitor for Slovakia is running. We are now calibrating warning thresholds against real-world impacts and preparing a pilot with municipalities and water utilities.

Risk maps

EU 1 km ~ SK 250 m

Flash-drought monitor

Running for Slovakia

Threshold calibration

Against real impacts

Pilot

Municipalities & utilities

The vision

A system that tells a municipality, a utility or a farmer one to three weeks ahead that drought is building fast — and what to do about it: when to water, when to save, when to fill reservoirs or switch to a backup source. Turning drought and water-scarcity risk into decisions people can act on.

Meratch portal showing drought risk on a map with key indicators and active alerts

Phone in hand showing a severe drought risk alert

Behind every alert is a real scientist.

Jozef Pecho

Climate Analyst

Jozef has strong expertise in climate analysis and the evaluation of climate risks and extremes. At Meratch, he turns climate data into actionable insights for hydroclimatic monitoring and forecasting.

Climate change reaches us through water

When people talk about climate change, they almost always talk about temperature. That is understandable. We have measured temperature for a long time, reliably, at thousands of stations, and its history fits into a single curve that convinces even someone who has never held a thermometer.

Ondrej Zavodsky

HW Lead Engineer

Ondrej has a hardware engineering background from research on IoT electronic device design. At Meratch, he develops low-power IoT architectures and microcontroller workflows, including work on the skCUBE satellite project.

Soil moisture sensor

When we talk about climate change, we usually talk about temperature. But temperature floods nobody's cellar, dries no field and empties no reservoir. Warming reaches people, towns and infrastructure almost entirely through water — as floods, drought, storms and failing water quality.

Be ready to protect what matters most.

Tell us about your municipality and we'll show you exactly where the water rises first and how much warning Floodar can buy you.

Drought no longer creeps. It strikes.