Predicted climate change may have negative impact on many environmental components including vegetation by increase of evapotranspiration and reduction of available water resources. Moreover, a growing global population and extensive use of water for irrigation and industry result in increasing demand for water. Facing these threats, quantitative and qualitative protection of water resources requires development of tools for drought assessment and prediction to support effective decision making and mitigate the impacts of droughts. Therefore, the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management, National Research Institute has developed and implemented a set of tools for the operational drought hazard assessment. The developed tools cover drought indices estimation, assessment of sensitivity to it formation and drought hazard prediction. They are streamlined into an operational scheme combined with data assimilation routines and products generation procedures.

A drought hazard assessment scheme was designed to be implemented into the platform of a hydrological system supporting the operational work of hydrological forecast offices. The scheme was launched to run operationally for the selected catchments of the Odra River and the Wisla River basins. The crucial resulting products are presented on the website operated by IMWM-NRI: POSUCH@ (Operational System for Providing Drought Prediction and Characteristics) (http://posucha.imgw.pl/). The paper presents the scheme and preliminary results obtained for the drought event which began in August 2011.

The probability density functions were used to forecast the air quality in several monitoring sites located in Worek Żytawski region. Prediction of percentile 99.8 value (the maximum allowable 30-minute pollutant concentration) was made on the basis of the frequency function, which represented the annual distribution of SO2. Analysing the historical SO2 concentration data sets identified the form of distribution. The parameters of the distribution were estimated basing upon the annual average concentration prognosis. Then, the preliminary predicted distribution of S02 was verified every month by taking into account successively upcoming concentrations values recorded during the analysed period. The results proved that the air quality estimation obtained with the presented method of verification at the end of September and the ones typically calculated at the end of the year were similarly accurate.