Spatial and temporal monitoring of drought conditions using the satellite rainfall estimates and remote sensing optical and thermal measurements

Drought is an important natural disaster that causes devastating impacts on the ecosystem, livestock, environment, and society. So far, various remote-sensing methods have been developed to estimate drought conditions, each of which has advantages and restrictions. This study aims to monitor the real-time drought indices at the field scales via the integration of various earth observations. Our proposed method consists of two steps. In the first step, the relationships between long-term standardized precipitation indices (SPI) derived from PERSIANN-CDR rainfall data and two drought-dependent parameters derived from MODIS products, including normalized NDVI and soil-air temperature gradient, are obtained at the spatial resolution of PERSIANN-CDR grid (approximately 25 km). As the next step, the corresponding relationships are applied to estimate the drought index maps at the spatial resolution of MODIS products (1 km). Numerous analyses are carried out to evaluate the proposed method. The results revealed that, from various drought indices, including SPIs of different timescales (1, 3, 6, and 12-months), SPI-3 and SPI-6 are more appropriate to the proposed method in terms of correlation with temperature and vegetation parameters. The findings also demonstrate the competency of the proposed method in estimating SPI indices with average RMSE 0.67 and the average correlation coefficient of 0.74.