Abstract
Drought is among the most common natural disasters in North China. In order to monitor the drought of the typically arid areas in North China, this study proposes an innovative multi-source remote sensing drought index called the improved Temperature–Vegetation–Soil Moisture Dryness Index (iTVMDI), which is based on passive microwave remote sensing data from the FengYun (FY)3B-Microwave Radiation Imager (MWRI) and optical and infrared data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and takes the Shandong Province of China as the research area. The iTVMDI integrated the advantages of microwave and optical remote sensing data to improve the original Temperature–Vegetation–Soil Moisture Dryness Index (TVMDI) model, and was constructed based on the Modified Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI), land surface temperature (LST), and downscaled soil moisture (SM) as the three-dimensional axes. The global land data assimilation system (GLDAS) SM, meteorological data and surface water were used to evaluate and verify the monitoring results. The results showed that iTVMDI had a higher negative correlation with GLDAS SM (R = −0.73) than TVMDI (R = −0.55). Additionally, the iTVMDI was well correlated with both precipitation and surface water, with mean correlation coefficients (R) of 0.65 and 0.81, respectively. Overall, the accuracy of drought estimation can be significantly improved by using multi-source satellite data to measure the required surface variables, and the iTVMDI is an effective method for monitoring the spatial and temporal variations of drought.
Highlights
Drought is usually a water deficit caused by an imbalance in the water supply and demand due to the lack of precipitation [1,2]
The purpose of this study is to further explore the fusion of different source data to establish a new and high accuracy drought index, improved Temperature–Vegetation–Soil Moisture Dryness Index (iTVMDI), which is based on FY3B-Microwave Radiation Imager (MWRI) microwave data and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data in order
ITVMDI has accurate drought monitoring. It hasItbeen shown, over one year, hasaarelatively relatively accurate drought monitoring capability, so the iTVMDI was used in this paper for drought monitoring in Shandong Province capability, so the iTVMDI was used in this paper for drought monitoring in Shandong Province (Figure 7)
Summary
Drought is usually a water deficit caused by an imbalance in the water supply and demand due to the lack of precipitation [1,2]. It can be commonly divided into three types: meteorological drought (water shortage caused by the imbalance between precipitation and evaporation amount for a long time), agricultural drought (insufficient soil moisture available to plants) and hydrological drought (the phenomenon when runoff does not reach the standard value or the water level of aquifer drops) [3,4].
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