Abstract
Food security is often threatened by droughts during rice production. Although most of the rice is produced in lowland or irrigated “wet” rice fields, terraced paddy fields are important in the rice production system in island or mountainous countries. With the intensifying frequency of El Niño periods in recent decades, there has been a risk of droughts in terraced paddy areas. To mitigate drought, remote sensing data analysis could be an efficient and reliable tool for obtaining scarce ground monitoring data. In this study, crop water stress index (CWSI) and temperature vegetation dryness index (TVDI) were applied to evaluate the drought intensity, and hydrological monitoring data was provided as a support for the evaluation. The results indicated that droughts normally occurred during the dry season, and intensified during El Niño periods. CWSI and TVDI were visible to predict drought occurrences in the watershed area. TVDI overestimated the drought inside Keduang watershed compared to CWSI because of the complex condition of the terraced paddy area, including the hydrology in this area. The complex topography, high groundwater table, and continuous plot-to-plot irrigation helped to maintain the water availability and mitigated the drought impact for rice production in the studied terraced paddy field.
Highlights
Food security is often threatened by drought, which has been reported to be one of the dominant disasters affecting rice production [1,2]
The Land Surface Temperature (LST) data displayed how the surface was strongly influenced by the fluctuations of air temperature as it was becoming warmer during the El Niño period and cooler during the La Niña period
The tendency of LST was in accordance with the climate conditions, it was not enough to show the drought intensity as the crops plays a big role in the hydrology cycle; other components, such as biophysical parameters and vegetation indices, need to be considered to produce a more accurate index to monitor drought
Summary
Food security is often threatened by drought, which has been reported to be one of the dominant disasters affecting rice production [1,2]. In Indonesia, drought had been reported to be strongly related to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena, especially during dry seasons [3,4,5,6,7]. The increasing frequency of El Niño events in recent decades has increased the production loss risks in agricultural activities, especially in rice production. Change in rainfall patterns and extreme climate events such as El Niño and La Nina are some indicators of climate change that can be felt directly in the current time. It caused by the increasing average air temperature induced by the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere [9]. With the warmer air temperature due to El Niño, unstable weather conditions for agriculture were the result
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