Application of vegetation health index (VHI) to identify distribution of agricultural drought in Indramayu Regency, West Java Province

Abstract

The drought that occurred in Indramayu Regency was caused by a shift of the beginning season and a long dry season which affected the availability of water storage for plants. Indramayu Regency is one of the rice centers in West Java with 56% of its area is rice fields. But in recent years rice productivity has been reduced due to drought. The Indramayu District Agriculture Office noted that in 2012, 2015 and 2018 paddy fields. The purpose of this study was to determine the distribution of 2012, 2015 and 2018 wetland agricultural drought areas and their relationship with rainfall in Indramayu Regency. The VHI drought index (Vegetation Health Index) is used to determine the pattern of distribution of the drought area of agricultural land. VHI is a combination of VCI (Vegetation Condition Index) and TCI (Temperature Condition Index) derived from NDVI data processing (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), LST (Land Surface Temperature) of Landsat 7 and 8 images. The processing results of the VHI index show the distribution of drought levels no drought to extreme drought, where in 2012, 2015 and 2018 the distribution of drought in agricultural land has the same pattern, which is dominated by the coastal areas of Indramayu Regency due to the influence of less rainfall. While the level of mild drought is in the western and center regions of Indramayu Regency.