A comprehensive drought monitoring method integrating MODIS and TRMM data

Drought is a complex hazard caused by the breaking of water balance and it has always an impact on agricultural, ecological and socio-economic spheres. Although the drought indices deriving from remote sensing data have been used to monitor meteorological or agricultural drought, there are no indices that can suitably reflect the comprehensive information of drought from meteorological to agricultural aspects. In this paper, the synthesized drought index (SDI) is defined as a principal component of vegetation condition index (VCI), temperature condition index (TCI) and precipitation condition index (PCI). SDI integrates multi-source remote sensing data from moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) and tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) and it synthesizes precipitation deficits, soil thermal stress and vegetation growth status in drought process. Therefore, this method is favorable to monitor the comprehensive drought. In our research, a heavy drought process was accurately explored using SDI in Shandong province, China from 2010 to 2011. Finally, a validation was implemented and its results show that SDI is not only strongly correlated with 3-month scales standardized precipitation index (SPI3), but also with variation of crop yield and drought-affected crop areas. It was proved that this index is a comprehensive drought monitoring indicator and it can contain not only the meteorological drought information but also it can reflect the drought influence on agriculture. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.