Drought Monitoring Based on Remote Sensing in a Grain-Producing Region in the Cerrado–Amazon Transition, Brazil

Mairon Ânderson Cordeiro Correa De Carvalho,Demetrius David Da Silva,Marionei Fomaca De Sousa Junior,Múcio André Dos Santos Alves Mendes,Ibraim Fantin Da Cruz,Uilson Ricardo Venâncio Aires,Eduardo Morgan Uliana,Camila Aparecida Da Silva Martins

doi:10.3390/w12123366

Abstract

Drought is a natural disaster that affects a country’s economy and food security. The monitoring of droughts assists in planning assertive actions to mitigate the resulting environmental and economic impacts. This work aimed to evaluate the performance of the standardized precipitation index (SPI) using rainfall data estimated by orbital remote sensing in the monitoring of meteorological drought in the Cerrado–Amazon transition region, Brazil. Historical series from 34 rain gauge stations, in addition to indirect measurements of monthly precipitation obtained by remote sensing using the products CHIRPS-2.0, PERSIANN-CDR, PERSIANN-CCS, PERSIANN, GPM-3IMERGMv6, and GPM-3IMERGDLv6, were used in this study. Drought events detected by SPI were related to a reduction in soybean production. The SPI calculated from the historical rain series estimated by remote sensing allowed monitoring droughts, enabling a high detailing of the spatial variability of droughts in the region, mainly during the soybean development cycle. Indirect precipitation measures associated with SPI that have adequate performance for detecting droughts in the study region were PERSIANN-CCS (January), CHIRPS-2.0 (February and November), and GPM-3IMERGMv6 (March, September, and December). The SPI and the use of precipitation data estimated by remote sensing are effective for characterizing and monitoring meteorological drought in the study region.

Highlights

Drought is one of the most challenging and complex natural disasters, with negative impacts on the economy and environment [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The analysis of the average monthly standardized precipitation index (SPI) values (Figure 3) showed that more than 91.9% of the monthly accumulated precipitation occurring in the study region can be categorized by SPI as normal precipitation (NP), while 4.7% was classified as extremely dry (ED) and moderately dry (MD)
There is a relationship between the drought events detected by SPI and the reduction in grain production that occurs under rainfed conditions

Summary

Introduction

Drought is one of the most challenging and complex natural disasters, with negative impacts on the economy and environment [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Agriculture activities are highly impacted by drought, Water 2020, 12, 3366; doi:10.3390/w12123366 www.mdpi.com/journal/water. Losses due to droughts in regions whose economy is based on agribusiness affect the entire sector, such as services suppliers, machinery and agricultural implements, and fertilizers and agricultural defensives [2,4,7,8,9,10,11]. As the drought persists over time, other problems can directly affect the population, such as water supply, conflicts of water use, reduced electrical energy generation, and risks to public health due to low water quality [7,9,11,12,13]. Droughts reduce biodiversity, leading to vegetation and animal death, increase the risk of forest fires, and alter soil physical properties, with a consequent change in runoff [8,10,14,15]. The work in [16] observed that droughts result in a reduction in the vegetative development rate and biomass accumulation, with significant consequences for carbon sequestration. [17,18] pointed out that droughts in the Amazon rainforest increased deforestation due to forest fires, with an increase in forest fragmentation and greenhouse gas emission

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion