ABSTRACT
Risk monitoring is perhaps one of the least discussed components of risk management. Structural inspection, nondestructive testing (NDT), and structural health monitoring (SHM) have been advocated and used for decades as a means of risk monitoring (Ettouney and Alampalli 2012a, 2012b). These methods have been used as the main means for monitoring capacity, demands, and/or exposure, and thus can be used to partially monitor risk. However, these three popular processes are not entirely sufcient or have not been used in a systematic fashion for proper and complete risk monitoring. This is partly because of their use and ability in monitoring only one of the needed parameters, that is, either capacity (or vulnerability), demands (or threats/hazards), or exposure. These processes are generally not well suited for monitoring consequences, which is needed for proper and accurate risk monitoring
Several researchers from various elds have explored risk monitoring. This section briey describes some of these studies. Panu and Sharma (2002) explored consequence monitoring, which is an integral part of risk monitoring. According to them, the denition of agricultural drought hovers around soil moisture deciency in relation to climatic factors (water supply) and crop water consumption and its impact on agricultural production. Mannocchi et al. (2009) contend that an objective denition of agricultural drought, for example, the critical level of imbalance that determines the critical impact on agricultural production has not yet been univocally dened. Therefore, agricultural drought is not clearly differentiated from the other phenomenon of water shortage, and consequently, it is not easy to identify or to quantify the corresponding risk. Hence, they proposed a new methodology for the risk analysis and economic impact assessment of agricultural droughts (ADERA) based on an original objective denition of agricultural drought that accounts for its peculiar characteristics. Authors applied this methodology to a rain-fed sunower crop in the Papiano (central Italy) experimental plots for which the 26-year time series for yield and the corresponding phenological, climatic, and economic data were available. They conclude, based on a case study, that the methodology makes it possible to evaluate the intensity of the agricultural drought phenomenon and to evaluate whether the hazard will occur within or after the growing period and, therefore, to assess whether the vulnerability is low or high in terms of the amount of water eventually needed to mitigate the phenomena. The main limitation of this method is that it requires the experimental crop yield time series, which is typically unavailable.
