Satellite Remote Sensing for Monitoring Agriculture Growth and Agricultural Drought Vulnerability Using Long-Term (1982–2015) Climate Variability and Socio-economic Data set

Abstract

Climate variability significantly impact the agricultural growth, stress, cropping pattern, phenophase and its vulnerability. Satellite derived indices, climate and socio-economic data sets have been used to study the time series trend of agricultural NDVI and agriculture drought vulnerability for two states of India namely Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The study uses NOAA AVHRR GIMMS NDVI.3g. v1 (1982–2015) data set. The trend analysis of climate and soil moisture was carried out to understand their impact on the agriculture growth/stress, length of the growing period (LGP) and projected agriculture NDVI for IPCC climate AR5 2050 RCP 2.6 scenario. A novel approach is applied to the integrated data sets i.e. satellite and climate variables including socio-economic to assess the agricultural drought vulnerability at the district level, and at the tehsil level of united Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states for the recent-past. We further projected the vulnerability using IPCC AR5 2050 and 2070 climate RCP 2.6 scenario. The study has revealed that climate and soil moisture have a significant impact on LGP and agriculture condition. The predicted agricultural NDVI are near like normal years (2007 and 2013) indicating climate change signatures are not expected in near future. There is a need to improve the understanding using higher resolution soil moisture data to plan appropriate adaptive and mitigation strategies for the agricultural drought conditions in changing climate scenario.