Assessment of the Hail Damage on Agricultural Crops from North of Baragan Plain, Romania, Using Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Hail is one of the dangerous meteorological phenomena facing society. The present study aims to analyze the hail event from 20 July 2020, which affected the villages of Urleasca, Traian, Silistraru and Căldăruşa from the Traian commune, Baragan Plain. The analysis was performed on agricultural lands, using satellite images in the optical domain: Sentinel-2A, Landsat-8, Terra MODIS, as well as the satellite product in the radar domain: Soil Water Index (SWI), and weather radar data. Based on Sentinel-2A images, a threshold of 0.05 of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) difference was established between the two moments of time analyzed (14 and 21 July), thus it was found that about 4000 ha were affected. The results show that the intensity of the hail damage was directly proportional to the Land Surface Temperature (LST) difference values in Landsat-8, from 15 and 31 July. Thus, the LST difference values higher than 12° C were in the areas where NDVI suffered a decrease of 0.4-0.5. The overlap of the hail mask extracted from NDVI with the SWI difference situation at a depth of 2 cm from 14 and 21 July confirms that the phenomenon recorded especially in the west of the analyzed area, highlighted by the large values (greater than 55 dBZ) of weather radar reflectivity as well, indicating medium–large hail size. This research also reveals that satellite data is useful for cross validation of surface-based weather reports and weather radar derived products.

The Effect of Climatic Changes – Hail and Storm on Sunflower Hybrids – Constanta County, Dobrogea Area, Romania

“…Hail is one of the dangerous meteorological phenomena facing society (Angearu et al, 2021), causing significant damages to agricultural crops. The damage with hails is determined by the size ranges and the number of hailstones that fall per unit area…”