The Second Modified Perpendicular Drought Index (MPDI1): A Combined Drought Monitoring Method with Soil Moisture and Vegetation Index

Abstract

Since soil moisture and vegetation index are direct and important indicators for surface drought status, a new drought monitoring method (MPDI1) is developed in NIR-Red reflectance space. It is a combination of two satellite-derived variables—a soil moisture component using the Perpendicular Drought Index (PDI), and a vegetation component using the Perpendicular Vegetation Index (PVI). Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) image and in-situ ground observation are introduced to validate the accuracy of the proposed method. Results indicate that MPDI1 is highly consistent to the in-situ ground observation with the coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.49) between MPDI1 and 5–20 cm mean soil moisture, which is slightly higher than the coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.42) between MPDI1 and 10 cm soil moisture. Compared with drought indices such as PDI and the Modified Perpendicular Drought Index (MPDI), MPDI1 provides quite similar trends for bare soil or lower vegetated surface, but it demonstrates a better performance in measuring densely vegetated surface. This paper concludes that MPDI1 provides correct and sufficient information on surface drought status in soil-plant continuum, which appears to have robust available and great potential for surface drought estimation in China and other countries.