Abstract
Abstract Agricultural drought is one of the most frequent natural disasters in India's southern part. Remote sensing-based drought indices give advantages in terms of continuous monitoring of land surface. The crop production in the Warangal region in India's southern part is adversely affected due to insufficient rainfall and poor irrigation management. This study aims to develop a multivariate remote sensing-based composite drought index (CDI) to monitor the agricultural drought. Landsat-8 satellite data for all the 11 subregions of Warangal urban and 15 subregions of the rural district of Telangana from 2013 to 2020 for the month of May is used to obtain drought indices. The drought indices are used in this study to develop MIDMI and are compared according to the percentage area of the Warangal region under five different drought categories. In this study, the MIDMI is computed by a weighted average of five vegetation drought indices for the Warangal region as per the method developed by Iyengar and Sudarshan for the multivariate data. MIDMI for all the 26 subregions of the Warangal rural and Warangal urban districts is between 0.4 and 0.6, which makes the Warangal region moderately vulnerable to agricultural drought.
Highlights
Drought is one of the least understood but most expensive natural disasters and affects water resources severely (Al-Najjar et al 2020)
This study aims to determine the vulnerability of drought in the Warangal region of Telangana province of India using Multivariate Integrated Drought Monitoring Index (MIDMI)
This study developed a multivariate integrated drought monitoring index (MIDMI) using the Landsat8 satellite data for the Warangal region of Telangana, India, by assigning unequal weights to Moisture stress index (MSI), Normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalised difference water index (NDWI), Normalised multiband drought index (NMDI), and Surface water content index (SWCI) as per the Iyengar and Sudarshan method
Summary
Drought is one of the least understood but most expensive natural disasters and affects water resources severely (Al-Najjar et al 2020). It can occur in any climate regime. The areas affected by droughts are much larger than other natural hazards (Fung et al 2019). Drought monitoring has gained significance due to its frequency and severity, which involves developing several drought indices. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on extreme events and disasters cites a more considerable uncertainty in capturing recent drought trends than other natural hazards (Cardona 2005; Cardona et al 2012; Limones et al 2020).
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