Monitoring Drought and its impact on Agriculture using Drought Indices and Geo-informatics Technology in Patan District, Gujarat

Year 2019, Volume: 6 Issue: 2, 153 - 162, 08.08.2019

MANIK Kalubarme , Mithwa Acharya , Shital H. Shukla

https://doi.org/10.30897/ijegeo.554465

Cited By: 4

Abstract

Remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) has played a
major role in the study of different types of drought i.e. agricultural or hydrological
drought. The present study on agricultural Drought assessment was carried out
in the Patan District of North Gujarat, India. This study focuses on the
assessment of climate change and its impact on Agriculture using Remote Sensing
(RS) and GIS technology. The Landsat-7 TM and Landsat-8 OLI data of
February-2002 and February-2018 covering Patan District was analysed for Land
use/Land Cover mapping and monitoring changes in agricultural area over the
period of 16-years. The Spectral vegetation index namely Normalized Difference
Vegetation Index (NDVI) was computed using Landsat-7 TM and Landsat-8 OLI
digital data for assessment of changes in agricultural vegetation during the
drought and normal monsoon periods. Meteorological data like Minimum &
maximum Temperatures and rainfall was collected from State Data Centre. Various
Drought indices like Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Potential
Evapo-Transpiration (PET) and Aridity Index (AI) were computed using meteorological
data of past 16-years.

 

The results indicate that total agricultural
vegetation during drought season was only 21.9 per cent (2002) which has
increased to 58.7 per cent during the normal monsoon season of 2018. The
rainfall deviations were computed for various years and it was observed that high
negative rainfall deviations (-40 to -70%) having low rainfall occurrence were
associated with negative SPI values ranging from -0.5 to -1.1 in Patan
district. These positive rainfall deviations were associated with positive SPI
values of 1.08, 0.57 and 0.62 of respective years indicating moderately wet and
mildly wet conditions. During drought year of 2002 total precipitation was very
less resulting in Aridity Index of 0.09 which is classified as hyper arid for
the Patan District.

Keywords

Agricultural Drought, Meteorological Drought indices, Aridity Index, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Potential Evapo-Transpiration (PET)

References

• Reference1: Dr A N Singh, Director, uttar Pradesh Remote Sensing Centre, Lucknow
• Reference2: Dr markand Oza, Scientist, Space Applications Centre (ISRO), Ahmedabad
• Reference3: Dr I C Matieda, Ex Head, Geospatial Techniques Division, Space Applications Centre (ISRO), Ahmedabad