Abstract
Abstract. The deficiency in rainfall leads to meteorological droughts. Its manifestations are visible both in the vegetation cover and soil moisture. The present study assessed the characteristics of agricultural drought following meteorological droughts. The study also assessed the severity of meteorological droughts and their manifestation on the agriculture and soil moisture in a semi-arid area. The study has been carried out for the Malaprabha sub-basin which partly covers three districts of North Interior Karnataka, India. India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) criteria have been used to identify the drought years, and its severity has been assessed through the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI). The IMD’s monthly rainfall data were used to identify the drought years and periods for the region. Among the drought years, the mild, moderate, and severe drought along with deficit and excess rainfall years were considered to assess and characterize the soil moisture conditions and the agricultural drought. The satellite image based indices for these selected years were constructed to determine the soil moisture conditions and the agricultural drought severity. The Temperature-Vegetation Dryness Index (TVDI) was used to determine the soil moisture conditions. The indices employed to determine the agriculture drought are NDVI, Thermal Condition Index (TCI), Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), and Vegetation Health Index (VHI). These satellite-based indices were calculated using the Landsat images of the selected drought and non-drought years. The results showed that the seasonal and annual drought are frequent in the study area. There are spatial and temporal variations in the drought years and their severity. The satellite-based indices clearly indicate the spatial variation in the agriculture droughts and its intensity. It has been found that the impact of drought on agriculture has significantly reduced due to the development of well-irrigation in the sub-basin. VHI is more appropriate in determining the agricultural drought and its characteristics.
Highlights
Drought is a natural climatological phenomenon due to deficit rainfall than the normal received in an area
The Vegetation Health Index (VHI) values will be lower for water bodies, similar to drought areas since both normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and land surface temperature (LST) values are low in areas covered by water
The agricultural drought conditions closely associated with the meteorological drought experienced in the basin
Summary
Drought is a natural climatological phenomenon due to deficit rainfall than the normal received in an area. Earlier indices such as the Palmer drought severity index (Palmer, 1965), Bhalme and Mooly drought index (Bhalme and Mooley, 1980), standard precipitation index (McKee et al, 1993, 1995) and a more recent index, standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (Vicente-Serrano et al, 2010), used either a single or combination of climatic elements to identify and quantify the drought characteristics Use of these indices is limited by the availability of climate data for a reasonable period in the vicinity of the area of interest. Drought intensifies as and when high atmospheric temperature concurrently prevails with low soil moisture conditions In such situations, the vegetation health due to atmospheric temperature can be effectively analyzed using satellite images. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XLII-3/W6, 2019 ISPRS-GEOGLAM-ISRS Joint Int. Workshop on “Earth Observations for Agricultural Monitoring”, 18–20 February 2019, New Delhi, India most widely used satellite image-based index for drought monitoring and characterization (Bento et al, 2018). The study explored the use of satellite remote sensing based soil moisture and drought indices for this purpose
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