Joint use of soil moisture and vegetation growth condition by remote sensing on the agricultural drought monitoring

Remote sensing is one of important methods on the agricultural drought monitoring for its long-term and wide-area observations. The detection of soil moisture and vegetation growth condition are two widely used remote sensing methods on that. However, because of the time lag in the impact of water deficit on the crop growth, it is difficulty to indicate the severity of drought by once monitoring. It also cannot distinguish other negative impact on crop growth such as low temperature or solar radiation. In this paper, the joint use of soil moisture and vegetation growth condition detections was applied on the drought management during the summer of 2013 in Liaoning province, China, in which 84 counties were affected by agricultural drought. MODIS vegetation indices and land surface temperature (LST) were used to extract the drought index. Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), which only contain the change in vegetation index, and Vegetation Supply Water Index (VSWI), which combined the information of vegetation index and land surface temperature, were selected to compare the monitoring ability on drought during the drought period in Liaoning, China in 2014. It was found that VCI could be a good method on the loss assessment. VSWI has the information on the change in LST, which can indicate the spatial pattern of drought and can also be used as the early warning method in the study.