Comparative Evaluation of Microwave L-Band VOD and Optical NDVI for Agriculture Drought Detection over Central Europe

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 13; no. 7; p. 1251
• Main Authors: Afshar, Mehdi H., Al-Yaari, Amen, Yilmaz, M. Tugrul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.04.2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Agricultural drought; Agriculture; Anomalies; Climate change; Climatic conditions; Datasets; Drought; Environmental Sciences; Evaluation; Land use; NDVI; Normalized difference vegetative index; Optical analysis; Optical thickness; Phenology; Pixels; Precipitation; Radiation; Remote sensing; Response time; SMOS VOD; Soil moisture; Spatial discrimination; Spatial resolution; Spectroradiometers; SPI; Standardized precipitation index; Time lag; Time series; Vegetation; Central Europe; Europe; SMOS VOD; agricultural drought; NDVI; SPI
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs13071251

Agricultural droughts impose many economic and social losses on various communities. Most of the effective tools developed for agricultural drought assessment are based on vegetation indices (VIs). The aim of this study is to compare the response of two commonly used VIs to meteorological droughts—Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) vegetation optical depth (VOD). For this purpose, meteorological droughts are calculated by using a standardized precipitation index over more than 24,000 pixels at 0.25° × 0.25° spatial resolution located in central Europe. Then, to evaluate the capability of VIs in the detection of agricultural droughts, the average values of VIs anomalies during dry and wet periods obtained from meteorological droughts are statistically compared to each other. Additionally, to assess the response time of VIs to meteorological droughts, a time lag of one to six months is applied to the anomaly time series of VIs during their comparison. Results show that over 35% of the considered pixels NDVI, over 22% of VOD, and over 8% of both VIs anomalies have a significant response to drought events, while the significance level of these differences and the response time of VIs vary with different land use and climate conditions.