Assessment of Agricultural Drought in a Semi-Arid Area Using Remote Sensing.

The impact of drought on vegetation is referred to as agricultural drought. Agricultural drought is commonly monitored at a basin scale using satellite based vegetation indices such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI). It is mainly the result of precipitation shortages, differences between actual and potential evapotranspiration, high temperatures and soil water deficits. Drought resulting from irregular or decreased rainfall, and increasing temperatures causes a reduction in NDVI and SAVI in areas of vegetation. The combination of NDVI, SAVI and surface temperature provides very useful information for agricultural drought monitoring. The study area is Kavakdere Basin in the west of Turkey which has a semi-arid climate. This study aims to evaluate the spatial and temporal drought using the vegetation indices and temperature data based on remote sensing. The correlation coefficients between NDVI, SAVI and surface temperature show negative correlation.