Application of Sentinel 2 data for drought monitoring in Texas, America

Abstract

Drought is a major hazard that affects many different fields around the world. Among the various adverse effects of drought, its influence on agriculture is most direct and significant. The mapping and monitoring of drought have received serious attention from not only the policymakers, but also the scientific community. Over the recent years, a variety of drought monitoring models derived from remote sensing data were developed based on the change characteristics of vegetation and soil caused by drought. Perpendicular drought index (PDI), which was developed on the basis of spatial characteristics of moisture distribution in near–red reflectance space, could generally reflect drought condition and was widely used. Texas State in America is usually affected by drought. This paper evaluated the drought occurred in the west of Texas, America in 2017 using PDI calculated with Sentinel 2 data. The precipitation data was collected from the national centers for environmental information website and international soil moisture network. The precipitation anomaly index was used to determine the accuracy of PDI. The result showed that, PDI had strong correlation with the precipitation anomaly index, with the correlation coefficient of -0.66.