Correlation analysis of agricultural drought risk on wet farming crop and meteorological drought index in the tropical-humid region

Abstract

In the tropical-humid region, wet farming crops (e.g., paddy) are a common agricultural commodity with a high-water requirement. Usually planted in the Asia monsoon region with a high precipitation rate, these crops are divided into the wet cropping season and the dry cropping season. During the dry cropping season, they are particularly vulnerable to agricultural drought caused by the decrease in precipitation. This study used Indonesia as a case study and is aimed at assessing the agricultural drought risk on a wet farming crop during the dry cropping season by examining the correlation between the drought hazard and its risk. For hazard assessment, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was used to assess the agricultural drought, by using the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) which has 0.1° × 0.1° spatial resolution. The result of correlation analysis between the SPI and drought-affected areas on a city scale showed that SPI-3 in August is the most suitable timescale to assess the agricultural drought in Indonesia. The agricultural drought risk assessment was conducted on the grid scale, where the crop yield estimation model was developed with the help of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Based on the correlation analysis between SPI-3 and the detrended crop yield as drought risk indicators, the higher yield loss was found in the area above the threshold value (r-value ≤ 0.6) indicating that those areas were more vulnerable to drought, while the area below the threshold value has lower crop yield loss even in the area that was hit by the most severe drought, because the existing irrigation system was able to resist the drought’s impact on crop yield loss.