During the last decades, many climatic parameters are more and more deviating from the average according to the mean values registered since consistent weather observations are available. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) stated that the 2015, 2016 and 2017 years were the warmest since 1850 [1]. This trend is going to be confirmed in 2018 according to the preliminary data analysis of the last year. Drought events will likely occur more frequently or with an higher intensity either in Europe and in Asia [2,3]. Sri Lanka is not an exception, the norther-east area is already facing long period with very few precipitation events. Drought has multiple impacts on environmental and socio-economic aspects such as water resources management, human lives, energy consumption and many others. This climatic scenario highlights the importance of the development of monitoring systems to support the management of the drought risk.
The 4onse project (analysis of Open, Non-conventional, Sustainable and Effective monitoring systems), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), aims to evaluate “non-conventional” Environmental Monitoring System (EMS) based on open technologies both hardware and software. At this state of the project, after developing and validating the prototype [4], 30 weather stations have been deployed in the Deduru Oya Sri Lankan basin and collecting the basic weather parameters (air temperature, humidity, pressure, accumulated rain, wind speed and wind direction). The system can help developing and low-income countries in coping the lack in the monitoring and management of natural hazards. In fact, thanks to the collected data, it is possible to elaborate some drought indexes which help in evaluating the intensity of the dry periods. The Standard Precipitation Index (SPI) has been selected as principal indicator to evaluate droughts. The SPI has been calculated integrating the data collected by the 4onse stations together with the Climate Hazards group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) dataset. In this paper, the authors present the results of the methodology used and the proposed system to share the information that are useful to better take mitigation actions in time.

[1] WMO WMO statement on the state of the global climate in 2017; 2018; ISBN 978-92-63-11212-5.
[2] Spinoni, J.; Vogt, J.V.; Naumann, G.; Barbosa, P.; Dosio, A. Will drought events become more frequent and severe in Europe? International Journal of Climatology 2018, 38, 1718–1736.
[3] Guo, H.; Bao, A.; Liu, T.; Jiapaer, G.; Ndayisaba, F.; Jiang, L.; Kurban, A.; De Maeyer, P. Spatial and temporal characteristics of droughts in Central Asia during 1966–2015. Science of The Total Environment 2018, 624, 1523–1538.
[4] Strigaro, D.; Cannata, M.; Antonovic, M. Boosting a Weather Monitoring System in Low Income Economies using Open and Non-Conventional Systems: Data Quality Analysis. Sensors 2019, (accepted).

From the 80s, while the climate changes issue starts to rise interest, due to financial constraints and the advent of satellite era, monitoring networks begin to decline [1]. Remote sensing with its capability of global monitoring put on a side the direct observation that often requires high investments at local level for installation and maintenance. Nevertheless in-situ monitoring is essential for a large number of actions that requires continuous, long-term, high-frequency, and accurate data as well as to calibrate and validate remote sensing data. With the advent of IoT in situ monitoring is getting back the necessary attention and more people, also in the field of FOSS4G, are starting to work in this field.
The IstSOS development team is working since the 2009 to bring in-situ monitoring back to the golden ages fostering the interoperability and the data management best practices. Several projects are here presented to demonstrate how istSOS, IoT and openness can contribute to this goal through a number of applications in the fields of agriculture (ENORASIS), water management (hydromMetTI, FREEWAT, TRESA), risk mitigation (SITGAP, MIARIA), health (ALBIS), development and cooperation (4ONSE).

During the last years, a Borehole Data Management System (BDMS) has been developed by the Federal Office of Topography of Switzerland (Swisstopo). To facilitate the data exchange procedure, a standalone application built with closed source software is used, but this approach starts to feels too hard working by the users and recently an increasing number of partners start asking for a web-based solution. To fulfill this demand, we developed a new Web Application Prototype, sponsored by Swisstopo, using the latest Free and Open Source Technologies. The new application integrates some of the today’s best OSGeo projects and will be available (summer 2019) as a modular open source solution on GitHub and ready to use in a docker container available on Docker Hub. Through two types of authorization, Explorer users are able to search the BDMS for specific boreholes, navigate a configurable user friendly map, apply filters, explore the stratigraphy layers of each borehole and export all the data in Shapefiles, CSV or PDF. Editors are able to manage in details the informations and publish the results after passing a validation process.