Abstract
Abstract. The agricultural drought assessment and monitoring has become a prime concern in recent times as it impedes land capability and causes food scarcity. Therefore, the present study constructed a methodological framework through the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, which offers advanced and effective monitoring in a timely concern of the drought occurrences. The study has been carried out in the Kodavanar watershed, a part of the Amaravathi basin is noted with signs of drought such as insufficient rainfall and vegetation stress in the current situation. The remote sensing indices are utilised for the agriculture drought assessment including Land Surface Temperature (LST), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Temperature Condition Index (TCI), Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) and Vegetation Health Index (VHI). In particular, the VHI results show that the area of healthy vegetation and no drought category is rapidly decreased from 934.29 to 107.83 sq.km across the years and have been reached threatening condition as extreme drought category with extremely low vegetation cover has been increasing in a exponential proportion of over 5% in the year 2019 and 2020. However, the agriculture drought results compared through the meteorological drought indicator of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) reflects that the SPI and VHI are reflecting similar signs and indicating the dry condition of precipitation with moderate vegetation over the highlighted regions of northern tip and central eastern portions. This present work illustrates the effective use of the GEE platform in monitoring the agriculture drought and the highlighted portions of the study should be implemented with proper water resource management by the researchers, planners and policymakers in the Kodavanar watershed for reducing the vegetation stress.
Highlights
Drought is a naturally occurring climatic phenomenon that impacts human, environmental activity and several sectors of the economy worldwide and noted to be one of the highest and widespread forms of natural hazard
In the present study, the Kodavanar watershed part of the Amaravathi basin is selected as the study region which is noticed with declined surface soil moisture hindered due to change in rainfall pattern and extreme temperature anomalies
Annual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST) were generated for the consecutive year (2016-2020) and the minimum and maximum reflectance value of NDVI and LST is extracted to compute annual Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) and Temperature Condition Index (TCI)
Summary
Drought is a naturally occurring climatic phenomenon that impacts human, environmental activity and several sectors of the economy worldwide and noted to be one of the highest and widespread forms of natural hazard. In the present study, the Kodavanar watershed part of the Amaravathi basin is selected as the study region which is noticed with declined surface soil moisture hindered due to change in rainfall pattern and extreme temperature anomalies. These are signs of drought occurrences, which must be effectively monitored regarding agricultural stress and must be managed with proper management strategies. The temporal analysis reveals the frequency and intensity of vegetative stress, which helps to acquire a stronger understanding of the pattern of drought and useful in computing a potential agricultural drought in the study region It will be correlated with meteorological phenomena to validate the vegetative stress. The study attempts to give key knowledge on the study area of the Kodavanar watershed which will help the policymakers to develop new management and conservation techniques sustainably
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