Assessing the Efficiency of Vegetation Indicators for Estimating Agricultural Drought Using MODIS Sensor Images (Case Study: Sharghi Azerbaijan Province)

Abstract

Drought is a natural disaster. Because a significant impact on the agricultural and economy sector, it affects the lives of local residents. With Using of the remote sensing, drought can be studied through its effects on plants and agriculture resulting in more accurate and effective results found for modeling drought. In this study, the efficiency of agricultural drought indicators for estimating vegetation conditions will be examined. The results of <em>VCI</em> show that year 2001, 2008, 2000 and 2009 have the most rates of drought, presently and years 2010 and 2003 have been minimal. Used data are satellite images from Terra <em>MODIS</em> sensor precipitation data on 2000_2011.Rainfall data is for synoptic climatology station. To obtain the vegetation condition index (<em>VCI</em>) was used of the normalized vegetation index (<em>NDVI</em>). <em>NDVI</em> derived from bands 13 and 16. To evaluate the success, Standardized Precipitation Index (<em>SPI</em>) calculated at 9 stations on the time scale of 3 months to 4 years. By <em>SPI</em>, 2008 and 2001 with a maximum drought and 2010 and 2003 years have been the lowest. The results shows that for agricultural drought assessment through Remote Sensing, <em>VCI</em> would be an excellent model, And in areas where weather stations are Sporadic , or if there is no the model can be used to estimate drought.