Revisiting the Impact of Drought Over Mid-Continent USA From 2000-2019 Using High Resolution Data

Abstract

Drought-associated water shortage a complicated hazard, and extreme weather and climate events have serious impacts on agricultural, ecological, and socio-economic activities in any society. This work focuses on drought analysis using a high-resolution remote sensing and meteorological dataset from MODIS’s NDVI and LST to evaluate the Spatio-temporal distribution drought events and intensities in three physiographic regions of the USA from 2000–2019. Results were compared with other remote-sensing-based drought indices, such as the temperature condition index (TCI), Vegetation Health index (VHI), and it was observed that the VCI and VHI, which was a combination of vegetation and meteorological information, had a strong correlation with precipitation data than the NDVI-derived VCI. The results demonstrated the severity of vegetation stress and extreme droughts in 2000, 2006, 2011, and 2012. The long-term agricultural drought situation and compared with other drought indices, reveals a good agreement as to the TCI, VHI, and precipitation anomalies also decreased significantly.