Assessment & Monitoring of Agricultural Drought Indices Using Remote Sensing Techniques and their Inter-Comparison

Abstract

Agricultural drought is nothing but the decline in the productivity of crops due to irregularities in the rainfall as well as decrease in the soil moisture, which in turn affects the economy of the nation. As the Indian agriculture is largely dependent on the Monsoon, a slight change in it affects the production as well as the crop yield drastically. The agricultural drought monitoring, assessment as well as management can be done more accurately with the help of geospatial techniques like Remote Sensing. In present study agriculture drought is estimated in vadodara district. The purpose of the study is to analyze the vegetation stress in the Vadodara district with the calculation of NDVI, NDWI, MNDWI, WRI, NDBI and NDSI indices values. The results of NDVI values shows agricultural fields more susceptible to drought. Similarly, decreasing trend was observed in NDWI index which is 22.12% to 19.3% from 2013 to 2018.The builtup index (NDBI) is increasing by 1.85% in last 5 years. The Water ratio index is also showing decreasing trend in study area by 22.35% to 14.29%. The intercomparisions of NDVI and all other indices with rainfall data provides very useful information for agricultural drought monitoring and early warning system for the farmers. The findings of this research will be of interest to local agriculture authorities, like plantation and meteorology departments to understand drier areas in the state to evaluate water deficits severity and cloud seeding points during drought.