Remote sensing of drought: Progress, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

This review surveys current and emerging drought monitoring approaches using satellite remote sensing observations from climatological and ecosystem perspectives. We argue that satellite observations not currently used for operational drought monitoring, such as near-surface air relative humidity data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder mission, provide opportunities to improve early drought warning. Current and future satellite missions offer opportunities to develop composite and multi-indicator drought models. While there are immense opportunities, there are major challenges including data continuity, unquantified uncertainty, sensor changes, and community acceptability. One of the major limitations of many of the currently available satellite observations is their short length of record. A number of relevant satellite missions and sensors (e.g., the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) provide only a decade of data, which may not be sufficient to study droughts from a climate perspective. However, they still provide valuable information about relevant hydrologic and ecological processes linked to this natural hazard. Therefore, there is a need for models and algorithms that combine multiple data sets and/or assimilate satellite observations into model simulations to generate long-term climate data records. Finally, the study identifies a major gap in indicators for describing drought impacts on the carbon and nitrogen cycle, which are fundamental to assessing drought impacts on ecosystems.

Multiscale evaluation of the Standardized Precipitation Index as a groundwater drought indicator

“…Another approach to quantifying drought is based on the use of large-scale gridded data products, e.g., from hydrologic models or satellites (e.g., Sheffield et al, 2004;Andreadis et al, 2005;Vidal et al, 2010;Samaniego et al, 2013;van Huijgevoort et al, 2013;Prudhomme et al, 2014;Mo and Lettenmaier, 2013;Nijssen et al, 2014;Hao et al, 2014;Li and Rodell, 2015;Damberg and AghaKouchak, 2014;Wanders et al, 2015;AghaKouchak et al, 2015). An extensive multi-model study (Prudhomme et al, 2014), for example, projected increases in hydrological drought severity in many areas around the world.…”

Recent Advances in Soil Moisture Estimation from Remote Sensing

“…Extensive validation studies, either through direct comparison against in-situ measurements, or intercomparison among different remotely sensed products, have been conducted to quantify the accuracy of these soil moisture products [19][20][21][22][23]. In addition, the applications of these products have also been widely explored in many fields like agriculture, hydrology, and climate sciences [24][25][26][27].…”

Satellite-Based Run-Off Model for Monitoring Drought in Peninsular Malaysia

“…Recent studies have linked rainfall deficits, soil thermal stress and vegetation growth and mortality to drought [2,3,[5][6][7]9,11,12,15,20,25,[27][28][29][30][31][32]36,[50][51][52], highlighting the need for operational drought monitoring systems that can show drought intensity, location and extent [16]. In response, this study devised an operational procedure and algorithm, a run-off model, from TMPA rainfall and MODIS evapotranspiration products for spatiotemporal drought assessment (Figures 3 and 4).…”