Abstract
Various drought indices have been developed to monitor drought conditions. Each index has typical characteristics that make it applicable to a specific environment. In this study, six popular drought indices, namely, precipitation condition index (PCI), temperature condition index (TCI), vegetation condition index (VCI), vegetation health index (VHI), scaled drought condition index (SDCI), and temperature–vegetation dryness index (TVDI), have been used to monitor droughts in the Greater Changbai Mountains(GCM) in recent years. The spatial pattern and temporal trend of droughts in this area in the period 2001–2018 were explored by calculating these indices from multi-source remote sensing data. Significant spatial–temporal variations were identified. The results of a slope analysis along with the F-statistic test showed that up to 20% of the study area showed a significant increasing or decreasing trend in drought. It was found that some drought indices cannot be explained by meteorological observations because of the time lag between meteorological drought and vegetation response. The drought condition and its changing pattern differ from various land cover types and indices, but the relative drought situation of different landforms is consistent among all indices. This work provides a basic reference for reasonably choosing drought indices for monitoring drought in the GCM to gain a better understanding of the ecosystem conditions and environment.
Highlights
Drought is considered an environmental disaster, and many researchers, including environmentalists, ecologists, hydrologists, meteorologists, geologists, and agricultural scientists have investigated droughts [1]
Since the temperature condition index (TCI) is related to land surface temperature (LST), and the vegetation condition index (VCI) is related to normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the conflict between the TCI and VCI suggests that vegetation flourished in the mountains despite the high LST, indicating that the vegetation in the Greater Changbai Mountains (GCM) area has high drought endurance
By comparing the annual pattern of change of drought indices with the meteorological factors such as precipitation and temperature, we found that the LST-based indices (TCI and temperature–vegetation dryness index (TVDI)) were not closely related to either annual average precipitation or temperature
Summary
Drought is considered an environmental disaster, and many researchers, including environmentalists, ecologists, hydrologists, meteorologists, geologists, and agricultural scientists have investigated droughts [1]. Desertification, water deficit, plant death, sandstorm, fire disaster, and other disaster phenomena [2]. Drought affects crop growth, influences global food prices, and contributes to political unrest [3,4,5,6]. Monitoring drought and studying its spatiotemporal dynamics are important for improving agricultural production, protecting the environment, and promoting sustainable social economic development [7]. Traditional drought-monitoring methods are based on ground- or station-based meteorological and hydrological observations, such as precipitation, air temperature, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and surface runoff. A series of meteorological drought indices, including the Standardized Precipitation
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