Transcript ppt

Remote Sensing of Drought
Lecture 9
What is drought?
• Drought is a normal, recurrent feature of climate. It
occurs almost everywhere, although its features vary
from region to region. Defining drought is therefore
difficult
• Conceptual definition of drought
– A protracted period of deficient precipitation resulting in
extensive damage to crops, resulting in loss of yield
• Operational definitions of drought
– Meteorological drought (region specific)
– Agricultural drought (not enough soil moisture for crop needs)
– Hydrological drought (deficiency in water suppliers at a
watershed or river basin scale)
– Socioeconomic drought (affect people and food supply)
Monitoring drought
• Since no single definition of drought, so there are various
indicators of drought
• Palmer drought index (PDI)
– Use T and rainfall
– More efficient for long term drought (several months)
• Standardized precipitation index (SPI)
– Use rainfall only
– The SPI can be used to monitor conditions on a variety of time
scales. This temporal flexibility allows the SPI to be useful in
both short-term agricultural and long-term hydrological
applications
• Drought monitor
– A comprehensive drought monitoring effort between the USDA
(JAWF/NRCS), NOAA/CPC (NCEP/NWS), NCDC (DOC/NOAA),
and the National Drought Mitigation Center.
http://www.weatherimages.org/data/imag273.html
http://www.txwin.net/Monitoring/Meteorological/Drought/pdsi.htm
http://drought.unl.edu/monitor/spi.htm
Drought Monitor
http://drought.unl.edu/dm/archive.html
Remote sensing for drought
monitoring
• Optical image:
– AVHRR, Landsat, SPOT, and MODIS
• Thermal image:
– Landsat, AVHRR, MODIS
1. Surface reflectance (%)
2. NDVI
3. Brightness temperature
(K) at top of atmosphere
4. Surface temperature (K)
-
1982-1999 AVHRR
2000-present MODIS
Thenkabail et al. 2004
MODIS bands 31 (10.78-11.28) and 32 (11.77-12.27)
NDVI itself doesn’t reflect
drought or not
Negative means below
normal
Current NDVI of a month – long term mean of the month
VCI close to 50% means
fair condition. Below 50%
means below normal,
below 35% is extreme
drought.
TCI close to 50% means
fair condition. Below 50%
means below normal, 0%
means very hot.
Linking AVHRR and MODIS for
continuous drought assessment
• Differences:
– preprocessing and spatial resolution (10km for AVHRR VS. 500 m for
MODIS)
– Narrow bands of MODIS result in a greater dynamic range of NDVI
for the same given biomass than AVHRR (AVHRR is likely to
“saturate” faster)
• Two datasets overlap in 2/2000-8/2001, which offers the
opportunity to link NDVIAVHRR and NDVIMODIS
• NDVIAVHRR is monthly, NDVIMODIS is 16-day, so NDVIMODIS
needs to composite to a 32-day product for comparison.
• Established regression models for two sources allow
drought occurrences to be examined from 1982 to present,
and well into future.
Study area was India and Pakistan
In most cases, the VCI and DEV complement each other, strong correlations. TCI
mostly reflect surface T, is not so valid as VCI and DEV, is not suggested for use